


But Tonight You're A Stranger

by Who_Needs_Reality



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bookstore, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Childhood Friends, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Letters and emails, childhood friends to enemies to friends to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-07-04 12:13:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 47,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15841077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Who_Needs_Reality/pseuds/Who_Needs_Reality
Summary: Clarke and Bellamy were best friends, until Clarke moved away, leaving behind a letter and a broken heart. Now, Clarke's back in Arkadia under the most tragic circumstances imaginable. And she's being forced to spend the summer working with him in his family bookstore. Which is difficult, because they're definitely not best friends anymore.No one really knows what they are.





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> Okayyyy bear with me because this is going to be a monster author's note.
> 
> 1) Icymi I did not watch the latest season of the show nor do I have any intentions of continuing with it. I am a fic-only Bellarke now. Make of that what you will.
> 
> 2) This is heavily inspired by the novel "Words in Deep Blue" by Cath Crowley. You don't need to have read it to read this, but it's very good so I highly recommend it anyway.
> 
> 3) This fic is the longest thing I have ever written in my life and it has been my baby, my unwieldy disobedient teenager, the source of my sleep paralysis, my muse, the bane of my existence etc etc for over a year now. It's kind of unbelievable that it's seeing the light of day at last and I'm honestly terrified to hit the publish button but I'm going to anyway. 
> 
> 4) The hugest of thank yous to my beta, Winter, who is basically singlehandedly responsible for making sure this is all actually readable, as well as for coming up with the title (it's from Silhouette) and helping me decide where to break this monster of a fic into chapters. Also huge thanks to Nai who put up with endless snapchats that were literally just of me complaining about writing this thing. Ladies you're the realest.
> 
> 5) I hope you guys enjoy it.

**_June 2014_ **

~~_ Dear Bellamy, _ ~~

~~_ I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to make things weird. Can we please just forget that ever happened? I need to see you or _ ~~

 

~~_ Bellamy. Seriously, you’re going to ignore me now? Real fucking mature.  _ ~~

 

~~_ Bell, _ ~~

~~_ I think I’m in love with you. Fuck it, I know I am. I love you so much and I needed you to know. I’m going to miss you so so much I can’t stand it, but if I get to tell you how I feel before I go, and if you tell me you feel the same, I think I can live with it _ ~~

 

~~_ HEY ASSHOLE PICK UP YOUR GODDAMN PHONE _ ~~

 

_ Hey Bellamy, _

_ I know this is a bit weird, but I really want to talk about what happened tonight. The thing is, I like you. Really like you, as in, not just because you’re my best friend. I  _ _ like _ _ you. And not just because of last night. That made me realise I can’t ignore my feelings anymore, but my feelings were already there. If I’m being honest, I think I might be in love with you. I have no idea what that’s supposed to feel like, but I think this is it. I mean, I love every single thing about you. I love your freckles and the way they look like stars on your face. I love the way you act like you’re hot shit until someone says one incorrect fact about Ancient Rome and you’re  _ gone _.  _ ~~_ I love the way you look without a shirt, especially after practice when you’re all sweaty. _ ~~ _ I love when you go too long without cutting your hair and then complain about it tickling the back of your neck. I love how much you love the bookstore, the way you see things, whole worlds in those old books and the people that have read them; I love the way you help me to glimpse them too. I love how much you care about things even--especially--when you pretend you don’t. I love the feeling of you hugging me, the feeling of being safe and whole. I love you even when I get the feeling you’re too dense to love yourself. And I know we haven’t spoken about last night, I know to you it probably wasn’t even a big fucking deal and I probably sound insane right now--but I loved last night too. Anyway my point is, I’m into you. Romantically. I’m just making sure you get that down because you can be really emotionally obtuse for someone so fucking smart. And hey, we all get that love letters don’t really seem to be my style, but I know you’d be all over it so--here you go. Pretend I’m the Wentworth to your Anne Eliot or whatever it is you and your beautiful dorky mind desire. Anyway. I’d really like if we could talk face-to-face before I leave tomorrow. Text me once you’ve read this, you know I’m going to be freaking out. _

_ See you in the morning? _

~~_ All my love _ ~~

_ Love, _

_ Clarke x _

***

**_4 years later (Present Day)_ **

 

It’s sunny when she gets out of the car. Clarke has no clue where the idea of weather matching mood comes from. As far as she can tell, it’s mainly bullshit. Arkadia, from a cursory, sweeping glance, looks pretty much the same as when she left it behind. A few of the shops have shut down and been replaced, some walls have been repainted and Indra’s Café has been remodelled and renamed “Grounders” but other than that, it looks exactly the same. Also bullshit. Nothing is really the same as before. But that’s the whole reason she’s come back, isn’t it?

She spots Callie quickly--she’s waiting in a pair of jeans that look completely alien on her, and she pushes her sunglasses to the top of her head when she sees Clarke. Clarke raises her hand in acknowledgement, and Callie waves, crossing the road to get to her.

“Hi honey,” she says, her arms fluttering vaguely around in the air as if she can’t decide whether to move in for a hug or not. 

“Hey,” Clarke turns away, stooping into her car to retrieve her bags from the backseat.

“How are you doing?” Callie asks, and Clarke has to swallow down an irritated sigh, because Callie’s using the  _ voice _ . It’s that voice that says “you know you’re doing shitty and I know you’re doing shitty, everyone knows you’re doing shitty because that is why you’re here after all, but I want to condescend to you so that I can feel like I’m being somehow nurturing.”

Clarke just shrugs. “Can we take these in?” she asks, hefting one of her duffel bags up a little. Callie looks relieved at the distraction and starts ushering her towards the house, offering to take one of the bags, rambling about having a room cleaned out and how the ensuite was redone last year. 

The inside of Callie’s house is fairly modern-looking, by Arkadian standards, with big airy windows and an open-plan floor. It makes Clarke feel exposed, antsy. Part of the appeal of Arkadia had been the vague memories of nooks and crannies, dark corners to fold yourself away into. Still, Clarke’s room is far enough from Callie’s that it maintains some semblance of privacy, and it faces the garden rather than the street. 

“I just put some basic stuff in there,” Callie says, gesturing broadly at the cream carpet, the powder blue curtains and bedspread, “I figured you could pick out your own decorations and things now you’re here.”

“Sure.”

“Well…” Callie looks like she wants to say more, but decides not to. “I’ll leave you to get unpacked, settle in. I’ll call your mom to let her know you’ve arrived safely.”

Clarke slumps on the bed after the door swings shut, the familiar wave of a weary, soul-deep tiredness washing slowly over her. She shouldn’t sleep right now--there’s unpacking to do, she needs to find a garage to check out the weird flashing light on her dashboard, and she hasn’t eaten since the half-full packet of Skittles she scarfed down as she passed through the Alpha Gas Station a couple of hours back--but she’s awake, she’s thinking, and thinking hasn’t led to anything good lately, so she closes her eyes and lets the exhaustion envelope her.

When she wakes up, she stares at the ceiling for a moment, trying to remember what day it is. A glance at her phone tells her she’s only been out for thirty minutes, and she heaves herself upright with a groan.

Callie’s laying dinner out by the time Clarke makes her way downstairs, and she braces herself for the inevitable  _ conversation  _ she knows is ahead. She twirls spaghetti round her fork without moving to eat it, until Callie clears her throat.

“I know how difficult this all is for you,” she says, “and that you’ve been…you’ve taken it hard.”

She drops her knife and fork with such force they clatter. “Sorry, should I not have?” Clarke snaps, cocking an eyebrow.

“Of course you--that’s not what I--” Callie coughs and readjusts her seat. “I just want you to know that we all want you to feel better. To take all the time you need.”

There’s no point in explaining how futile that’s going to be, so Clarke just takes a long sip of water. “Is it okay if I finish this later?” she asks, pointing at her plate with the fork. “I’m not feeling very hungry.” She gets up without waiting for an answer.

Two months ago, Clarke would still have been in the phase where she would have just given in to the constant urge to scream at someone and ended up saying something undeserved to Callie. Now though, she just disappears with a mumbled “goodnight” called over her shoulder, and starts changing for bed. She rubs her hips where her jeans have dug in, leaving red marks pressed into the soft flesh, criss-crossed like scars. But the imprints start to fade slowly, and she pulls her sleep shorts over them. There’s stuff she has to do tomorrow, and she’ll have to psych herself up to wander openly round Arkadia after this long. But right now, she just wants to sleep.

*

Clarke would, in all honesty, have probably been okay procrastinating on her car problems for a few more weeks, but Callie starts fretting when she finds out, offering to give Clarke rides wherever she needs to go. 

“It’s fine,” Clarke says, “I was gonna get it looked at today anyway.”

It isn’t hard to find a mechanic--there’s only one in Arkadia, and it hasn’t changed locations--or, apparently, had a paint job--since the last time she saw it.

The guy behind the desk, whose name tag identifies him as Sinclair, smiles when she walks in, nodding as she explains that there was a light on her dashboard that wouldn’t stop flashing her whole ride over.

“How long was the drive?” he asks.

She gives a one-shouldered shrug. “I came over from Boston.”

Sinclair lets out a whistle. “I’m not surprised a cross-country drive took its toll on your ride. What brought you so far?”

“I’m visiting a family friend.”

He eyes her a moment longer, but doesn’t ask anymore questions. “I’ll get my apprentice to have a look at it just now, bring it over to the garage.”

Clarke nods, then immediately stiffens when he opens the door to what looks like a break room and says, “Hey Reyes, get out here!”

For one wild moment, Clarke wonders if she can slip out of the door and hurry away before she’s spotted, but before she even has time to dismiss the idea, the door swings open and Raven appears. 

“Raven, I was just telling…” 

“Clarke,” she supplies when Sinclair looks at her, trying not to let her voice squeak.

“I was just telling Clarke that you could take a look at her car.”

Raven’s gaze is hard and unmoving, but doesn’t betray any recognition. “Sure.”

“Okay,” Sinclair moves for the break room, “I’ll leave you to it.”

Clarke lets herself look at Raven properly. There’s nothing dramatically different about her appearance that Clarke can put a finger on, but her face is older, all angles and edges, and she wears a tight high ponytail instead of a braid now. Her leather jacket is beaten and covered in grease stains.

“So,” Raven asks, “what are you doing here?”

“There was this flashing light on my dashboard. I think it’s an alert or something, I wanted to get it checked out.”

“Okay,” Raven says, pressing a button that opens the garage door, “I’ll take a look. But Griffin, I think you and I both know I meant what are you doing  _ back _ ?” She walks over to where Clarke’s car is standing, retrieves the keys, and opens the door.

“You know Callie Cartwig? My mom’s friend? I’m staying with her for a while.”

Raven turns on the ignition, barely giving the dash a cursory glance before announcing “You need an oil change,” and sliding out to get a canister. “You staying until college starts?”

Clarke feels her fingernails digging crescents into the heel of her palm. “Um. I’m actually taking a gap year.” 

She snorts. “I always figured pre-med couldn’t come to you fast enough. You always seemed one of those  _ I’ll rest when I’m dead  _ types.”

The edges of her vision blur and she feels bile surge up her throat. Clarke tries to breathe in and out through her nose quietly.  _ Not here _ , she tells herself,  _ not in front of Raven _ . “Yeah, well. My priorities have changed.”

“They’re not the only thing.”

There’s a tense silence as Raven changes the oil, and Clarke can only bring herself to speak by the time Raven’s wiping her hands down on her jeans.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and her voice comes out rasping. 

Raven turns to look at her properly. “Are you?”   
“Yes,” she swallows, “yes. I am.”

“It wasn’t hard, you get that right? We weren’t expecting you to visit or anything but it wouldn’t have been hard to pretend you cared and answer our messages.”

“I did care!” she protests “I just…”

Raven sighs. “You can stop squirming, Clarke, I’m not trying to fight you.”

“That seems out of character.” Clarke feels the tightness in her chest unclench slightly when Raven cracks a grin at that.

“For the record,” she says, “I still think you’re an asshole. But it’s good to see you again.”

“Yeah,” Clarke nods, “you too.”

Raven watches her for another long moment, as if she’s waiting for something. She catches Clarke’s eye and then shakes her head. “Whatever. Come on, I’ll ring you up at the front desk.”

She pays up and takes her keys from Raven. Neither one of them moves in for a hug, but Clarke raises her hand in an awkward half-wave. “So. I’ll see you round?”

Raven arches an eyebrow. “That’s kinda up to you, isn’t it?” But she shakes her head again and waves off the jibe. “I’ll catch you later, Griffin. And welcome home.”

“Thanks.”

Clarke doesn’t let herself heave a sigh of relief until she’s back in the car. She’d felt somewhat ambushed seeing Raven unexpectedly, but all-in-all, it hadn’t been too bad. It wasn’t exactly easy, and definitely not comfortable. But it was fine. It had gone about as well as she’d have hoped for. But then again, Raven isn’t the one she’s most worried about running into.

*

Bellamy is having a stressful enough day before Raven walks in. It’s not that he considers Raven a harbinger of bad news or anything, it’s just they don’t have a close enough friendship that she wanders in to just hang out or have a casual chat. She always has a  _ good reason _ for dropping by, and Bellamy has had enough of those for today. Mrs. Sydney had a good reason for suspending Octavia immediately and making him pick her up from school, and Octavia meanwhile claims that  _ she  _ had a good reason for getting into the fistfight to begin with, and all of this means he hasn’t had time to process his breakup, which Gina had a good reason for initiating. So yeah, he’s not exactly jumping for joy to see Raven marching into the bookshop with such purpose. Although to be fair, she hardly looks thrilled either. 

“Today’s not been a great day,” he says before she can speak, taking a new stack of books out of the donations box and starting to move through the shelves with them, “so before you say anything can you think about whether you’re going to actively make my life worse or not?”

She throws him a withering stare, and he sighs, because let’s face it, a solid ninety percent of his and Raven’s interactions are forced by crises of varying degrees of seriousness. “Do you need to sit down?” she asks. “Should I have some smelling salts on standby?”

He scowls at her. “Shut up.”

She rolls her eyes. “Have it your way. Anyway, I’m not saying I have great news or anything but I do think you’d rather hear it from me than be taken off-guard.”

That gets his attention, because if there’s one thing Bellamy doesn’t like (although who’s he kidding? There’s definitely more than one) it’s unexpected curveballs. “What’s up?”

“Remember Clarke?”

His hand falters on one of the shelves. Clarke Griffin? His best friend for the first fifteen years of his life? His favourite person in the world who he trusted more than anyone? Who up and left town one day without bothering to say goodbye and who ignored him like he was nothing until it was clear she’d forgotten him? 

Yeah, he remembers her. 

“What about her?”

Raven shoves her hands into her jacket pockets. “She’s back.”

He frowns. “You saw her?”

“She came into the garage. Clearly had no idea I’d be there.”

Bellamy picks up another stack of books. “Okay. Thanks for the heads up.”

He can feel Raven watching him when she asks, “You’re not going to freak out?”

Is he? He lets himself think about it for a moment. A few years back and yeah, this would probably have torn open some raw wounds and set him on edge.

“I don’t think so,” he says eventually. “It’s not like--nothing happened, you know? We haven’t been sitting on years of unresolved drama or anything, the friendship just…phased out.”

Raven nods, but still looks a little unconvinced. 

“Seriously,” he insists, “it sucked. And it hurt. But it was a while ago. I’m not about to have a meltdown.” And honestly, he isn’t. It’s not like Clarke’s really  _ back  _ back, or not back in his life anyway. He has more important things to focus on. 

“Thanks for the heads up,” he says, and Raven rolls her eyes.

“It was selfish. I just didn’t want to have to walk you through the stages of grief or whatever later on.”

“I’m touched,” he snipes, “but we all know Miller would be the one doing the hand-holding.”

He’s relieved when Raven leaves, if only so he can, for one moment, enjoy the relative quiet of the bookshop. The musty air and overstuffed shelves are the closest things Bellamy has to peace, and he could use some of that today. Bellamy opens up the spreadsheet that they use as a catalogue and starts entering the title, author, and price of each book. It’s a task he’s carried out a hundred times but never gets sick of--sorting through books is like sifting through little chips of people’s lives. This week’s haul includes a battered box set of  _ The Chronicles of Narnia  _ that looks so well thumbed-through they’re almost falling apart, a mass-market paperback edition of  _ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings  _ whose pages are littered with annotations, and a copy of Stephen Hawking’s  _ A Brief History of Time  _ whose crinkled, oddly waved pages belie the fact that it was likely dropped into a bathtub at some point. 

He’s pulling out the stool he uses to reach the highest shelf when he hears someone coming down from upstairs. 

“Bellamy, that you?” he hears Kane ask.

“Yeah! I’m just arranging the new stock.”

Kane appears in the doorway, his tie still not loosened around his neck. “Thanks for going in for Octavia today. Sorry I couldn’t make it out of work.”

Bellamy grunts his acknowledgement. As a guardian, Marcus is a fairly good one. He’s responsible about bills, conscientious about signing permission slips and getting everyone vaccinated,  _ competent  _ in all the ways Aurora Blake never was. But as grateful as Bellamy is to Kane for everything he’s done, he’s never really managed to progress past his underlying edge of mistrust, the wariness that stems from an inherent suspicion as to  _ why  _ Kane’s taken in his estranged cousin’s kids, from the knowledge that he could leave them out on their asses if he felt like it. 

“What was the incident the school were calling about?”

Bellamy wipes a hand down his face. “She got into a fight. Punched another kid and started a brawl.”

Kane frowns, and Bellamy can sense his trepidation. Criticising Octavia around Bellamy is something Marcus has always been nervous about, knowing Bellamy’s tendency to slightly overreact, but in this case, Bellamy can hardly blame Kane for the wariness.

“I need to talk to her about that,” he mutters, half to himself.

The image of Kane trying to reason with Octavia using his politically-honed tools of reasoning and rhetoric makes Bellamy cringe. 

“Okay,” he says, slowly.

Kane sighs. “I know you’re worried about your sister, Bellamy. But I’m her guardian. You’re going to have to believe I can look after her.” 

He fights down the urge to bristle, to shout that if Octavia won’t even let  _ him _ , her brother, look out for her, why would she let Kane? 

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” he says, and pauses. “Actually. I know it’s not. And I know you want to think your  _ let’s all be reasonable  _ spiel is gonna work. But at some point you’re going to have to believe I know my sister.” 

He moves to shelve some more books before Kane has a chance to see his face.

*

Miller’s the one who sees her first. He and Bellamy are walking down the High Street, debating which of the X-Men is the most valuable member, when Miller stops for a second, squinting into the window of the convenience store.

“You’re not gonna find your arguments to defend Cyclops in there, Miller.”

“Shut up,” Miller says before turning back to look at him. “I could have sworn I saw someone who looks kinda that blonde girl you used to hang with.”

Bellamy blinks. “Clarke?”

“That’s the one. Didn’t she move away?”   
“Yeah, but Raven mentioned she was back. I don’t know if she’s just visiting or she’s back for good, but. It could have been her.”

Miller nods his head over Bellamy’s shoulder. “That her?”

He turns around and for a second he’s confused because honestly, he’s looking for Clarke as he last saw her, in an ill-fitting paint-splattered t-shirt with flyaway braids and green plastic glasses. But then he registers that the girl he’s looking at is staring at him, and  _ shit _ , it’s her. 

It’s  _ Clarke Griffin _ , in the flesh.

She’s cut her hair short, dyed the ends pink, so it looks kind of punky and cool. Her glasses are gone, but her eyes are as sharp and blue as ever, and honestly, she’s stunning. 

And now, she’s walking straight towards him.

It sets him on edge though; this doesn’t  _ feel  _ like his Clarke, this untouchable Ice Princess who’s fixing him with the cold, calculating stare normally reserved for use by morticians on particularly grim corpses. 

“Clarke,” he says, and it seems strange to be saying her name to her after all these years, “long time no see.”

She’s barely looking at him, her gaze moving past his shoulders like she has places to be and he’s holding her up. “Yeah.” She sounds bored, flat.

“So. You’re back?”

“Seems like it,”  And then she walks off in the other direction.

*

By the time Clarke gets home, Callie’s smiling. It makes Clarke wary, because it’s that kind of smile people wear when they’re waiting to impart a “surprise.” And Clarke really hates surprises. 

“Hi, honey.” Callie hands her a cup of coffee, which she accepts. “How was your day?”

“It was good. I got my car fixed.”

“Good, good! And you met some of your old friends, right?”   
Clarke stiffens, racking her brain to remember if Callie had been outside the convenience store, if she’d seen the interaction. 

“That nice girl from the mechanic store came by,” Callie explains, and Clarke’s chest loosens, “dropped this off for you.’

Clarke takes the flyer that Callie hands her. It’s advertising a party being held in The Dropship on Friday night, something to do with electrofunk music and a guest DJ. 

“It sounds fun!” Callie says. 

“I’ll see how it goes. I’m gonna finish unpacking now.”

Her room is what can best be described as an organised mess right now, clothes and shoes and books and cushions scattered across the floor in piles, a half-empty suitcase still lying open on the floor. The scarce few decorations she thought to bring are still in there, and she starts pulling them out one-by-one. There are a couple of Boston postcards, a mug from the coffee shop near her house that she uses as a pencil pot, her high school pennant, and an envelope of photographs. There aren’t many, just the old family photo with her on her Dad’s lap, a couple of photobooth strips of her and her school friends, and then there it is, the one she’s been too scared to look at. 

It’s the only picture of her and Wells that she could bring herself to pack, and it’s ancient, a shot of the two of them as toddlers on the beach, Clarke standing proudly over a sandcastle and Wells distracted by a nearby seagull just at the moment the shutter snapped. Her grin shows that two front teeth are missing, and Wells wears a bucket as a hat. She likes the photo because she has no real memories of the day, no acute recollections of what Wells’ laugh had sounded like or what he’d said when she’d whispered one secret or another to him. She likes it because it’s demure and distant enough that emotionally, it draws a blank in her. Or it should--it  _ did _ . But now she stares at it in its unassuming plain gilt frame, the only photo of them, of  _ him _ , that she let herself bring, and feels a familiar tightening in her chest, a pain so sharp her vision goes white and her throat closes up. It seems paradoxical that an absence, a state of  _ not being there _ , weighs so heavily, but she feels herself crumple under it, wrapping her arms around her knees as though holding herself together. She squeezes harder, until it hurts how much her fingers are digging into her flesh, and then stands up with a shuddering breath. She doesn’t put the picture up.

*

In all honesty, Clarke has no intention of actually going to the party. It’s not like Raven’s going to notice whether she’s there or not, and the idea of milling around making small talk with people who will vaguely recognise her and ask questions about what she’s been up to makes her nauseous. 

But then again, after the incident with the photo, she thinks what she needs to do is get well and truly  _ drunk _ . She hasn’t been doing so up until now, contrary to what her teachers believed; at least, not since the night before the funeral. But now she really wants to. By the time Friday rolls around, she’s honestly looking forward to it inasmuch as she can honestly be said to be  _ looking forward  _ to anything these days. 

“Is that what you’re going in?” Callie wonders in a falsely bright voice that suggests she’s strongly hoping the answer is a resounding  _ no _ .

“Yup.” It’s her weird corset jacket, faux-leather leggings, and combat boots, a little too cliché “teenage burnout” to really seem rebellious but Clarke doesn’t really give a shit. “Everyone’s going to be too smashed to care about what I’m wearing anyways.” She sighs when she sees Callie’s expression. “What, did you think it would be the ice-cream and jello kind of party?”

“I just want you to be safe,” Callie says, frowning.

Clarke just nods. “You don’t have to wait up or anything. I’ll text you when I start heading back.”

The walk isn’t that long, but it’s still far enough away that by the time Clarke arrives at The Dropship, the party’s already in full swing. There’s some kind of electro-pop music pumping loudly, and a cacophonous thrum of singing and yelling. She weaves her way through the crowd to the bar, fake ID in hand, and doesn’t turn back until she has her drink half-downed.

“Long day at the office?” someone -- a stranger, mercifully -- next to her asks.

In response, she chugs the rest and puts the cup down. She wonders if she should find Raven -- probably, right? After all, she might as well turn her “drinking to forget” excursion into an excuse to make amends and kill two birds with one stone. Still, the crowd is roiling and unwieldy; it could take forever to find someone specific, especially considering she doesn’t even have Raven’s number. Instead, she turns back to the girl next to her, who introduces herself to Clarke as Niylah, and smiles.

“Can’t a girl get wasted without an excuse?”

Niylah grins back, turns her body to face her in a way that lets Clarke know that this girl is definitely interested.

“Maybe I just wanted a reason to make conversation.”

Clarke smirks, but finds herself hitting a mental roadblock. A while ago, this would have come to her more easily. Right now though, she’s not really sure what to say. Or why she wants to say anything.  _ Come on _ , she tells herself,  _ you should have some fun _ .  _ Have fun _ . But there’s a funny taste in her mouth now, a sudden desire to end this conversation quickly. 

“I’ve just remembered,” Clarke says, waving down the bartender, “my friend said she’d be here. I should probably go find her.”

“Oh,” Niylah says, and yes, Clarke is aware she’s an asshole in this situation, “I’ll catch you later?”

“Sure,” Clarke says, taking her drink and slipping off the barstool. 

She’s just tipsy enough now that she doesn’t really care that she’s alone, but not tipsy enough that she’s approaching other people, which is honestly about the right place to be, as far as states of inebriation go. She sees a couple of people she recognises--no one catastrophically familiar, just some girls in the grade below her, a tattooed guy she used to take the bus with--and several more she doesn’t. Clarke lets herself start to relax slightly, not quite dancing to the music but moving in time to it, swaying slightly, and that’s how Raven finds her.

“You showed up!” the girl says, sounding genuinely pleased, and pulling her in for a quick hug.

“I came for the booze,” she says honestly, waving her cup.

Raven grins. “Cool. Oh, this is Luna, by the way. She just moved in next door.” Raven gestures at the person next to her, a willowy girl with a mane of curls wearing a flowy tie-dyed skirt and looking a little uncomfortable in her surroundings. 

“Hey,” Clarke says, “I’m Clarke. I just moved back.”

“From where?” Luna asks.

“Boston.”

“Oh, nice, I have family in Massachusetts. What brings you back to Arkadia?”

Clarke’s grip on her cup tightens. “Nostalgia?” she offers.

“Funny,” someone drawls behind her, and she feels her shoulders stiffen as she recognises the him, “that’s not what I’d have guessed.”

There was a time when his voice would have sent a comforting warmth blooming through her chest, an effervescent giddiness to her head. Maybe after that, the memory of it would have turned the warmth to an angry flash of heat, the giddiness to a wave of humiliation-borne nausea, a metallic tang of betrayal. Now, though, there’s nothing, nothing beyond a twang of recognition. 

Clarke braces herself to look at him, and then she turns around and he’s  _ there _ . He’s gotten taller filled out since she saw him last, and she’s not used to the lazy, drunken smirk he’s fixing her with, but--

It’s him.

“Jesus, Blake,” Raven says, appearing beside Clarke, “you’ve been here ten minutes. What did you do, inject absinthe through an IV?”

“Unfortunately,” Bellamy slurs, “no. Though that sounds really fun. I like fun. Can we try that?”

Raven frowns. “What the fuck is wrong with you this fine evening?”

He glares at her. “Why would you assume anything was wrong?”

She sighs, then glances around. “Oh shit, where’d Luna go?” She throws her hands in the air. “Of fucking course I get assigned as minder of the town’s new airy-fairy. I better go find her.  _ You _ ,” she snaps her fingers at Clarke, “watch him.”

Bellamy is staring at her openly, and it makes her bristle.

“Well,” she says, “you’ve let yourself go.”

“Aw, don’t be jealous just because you never learnt how to.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “Wow. You’ve somehow become more of an asshole since I left.”

Bellamy laughs at that, and it’s jarring because it’s  _ his  _ laugh, his actual laugh, not the drunken chuckle he let out a moment earlier. “That’s rich coming from you, Princess.”

She shoves her hands in her jacket pockets. 

“I’m exactly the same kind of asshole as I’ve always been and probably always will be,” he says, “now  _ you _ .” He leans back, examines her like she’s a particularly tough sudoku puzzle. “You were a bit of a dick back in the day, sure. But I didn’t think you’d be  _ this  _ kind of asshole.”

She rolls her eyes, turns away from him. “I’m going to go get another drink,” she says. “Try not to drop dead, I told Raven I’d keep an eye on you.”

“’S Fine!” he calls after her, his voice carrying over the crowd, “’s not like any of us actually expect you to keep your promises anyway!”

*

Bellamy hadn’t really given much thought to when he was going to encounter Gina for the first time since the breakup -- that doesn’t seem like the type of thing you’re supposed to speculate on -- but if he  _ had  _ thought about, these certainly wouldn’t be the circumstances he’d choose. He’d prefer somewhere calm and neutral, the coffeehouse maybe, or the grocery store. He’d be pleasant and dignified and sober. Especially sober.

He is unfortunately in neither the coffeehouse nor the grocery store right now. And he’s certainly not sober. Gina must see him before he sees her, because by the time he’s looked her way she’s already saying something to her friends and starting to make her way towards him. 

“Bellamy,” she says, “hey.”

“Hey.”

“How are you holding up?”

He knows she means it kindly -- Gina only ever means things kindly -- but it irks him nonetheless.

“Good,” he says, “I’m good.”

She nods. “I’m glad. I just wanted to check on you, make sure there are no hard feelings.”

“Nah,” he shakes his head. “None at all. All feelings are soft.” He winces, he can hear how drunk he sounds.

Clearly Gina can too, because she sighs. It’s that same patient, understanding sigh of hers he’s heard a hundred times, except tonight, it grates on him. 

“Have you been drinking?” she asks.

“Haven’t you?” he snaps. It’s sharp, but he can’t help it. It’s not the fact that she’s seeing him wasted that bothers him, it’s the fact that she’s going to think he’s wasted because of  _ her _ . And sure, it’s not as though he’s  _ not  _ upset over the breakup, the realisation that someone else has decided they don’t want him anymore, but he can deal with it.  _ I wish I was this drunk over you _ , he thinks,  _ I wish you were my biggest problem right now _ . After all, breakups and exes? Those are the kinds of things you’re supposed to get smashed over. That’s normal. He wishes he could afford to have  _ that _ be the most disruptive event in his life. 

“Well,” Gina pats his shoulder in what she probably assumes is a comforting gesture, “take care of yourself.”

_ And when exactly do I have the time to do that _ ? some twisted, dark part of him wonders and he takes another gulp of his drink. It’s been awhile since he got this wasted, but Kane’s insisted on taking Octavia out to dinner somewhere they can have “an adult conversation” and he’s honestly just exhausted. O managed to get into  _ another  _ fight this same week, and Mrs Johnson from down the street had swung by the house yesterday to inform him, in a concerned voice, that she’d seen his sister hanging out with “those trouble-making kids from that TriKru Club.” Bellamy knows the kids she was talking about, a bunch of burnouts from the next town over who he was pretty sure were mixed up in some kind of gang warfare. He’d confronted Octavia about it after Mrs Johnson left, and she’d been  _ pissed _ , telling him she didn’t want him interfering. 

“Why do you wanna ruin my fucking life so bad, huh?” she’d yelled at him when he’d told her she was grounded. “Who decided you get to control what I do and who my friends are?”

“I’m doing this for your own good, O,” he’d said, half-stern and half-pleading, “I’d rather you hate me for a little while now than end up hurt later.”

“Well  _ good _ ,” she’d spat, “because I  _ do  _ hate you.”

And now, Bellamy’s here. Nothing’s actually been resolved, but hey, at least he’s drunk. Oh, and speaking of people who hate him, he becomes aware that Clarke’s casting him a disparaging glance from the bar. He can’t help but smirk at the image of this new, jaded Ice Princess who seems to exist on a plane of existence a few shades better than the rest of the world, if her attitude is anything to go by. There was a time when Clarke wouldn’t even have walked into a  _ house party  _ unless he’d begged and pleaded with and borderline extorted her, and she would have probably spent the evening clutching an unopened can of Diet Coke and lurking in the dullest corner of the room.

His smirk deepens when he catches her eye, and he can’t help raising his solo cup in a mock salute, mouthing the words  _ party hard, Princess _ at her.

Clarke rolls her eyes and takes a sip of her drink, leaning against the counter and surveying the scene before her coolly.

“She seems friendly.” Miller materialises by his shoulder, following his gaze. 

Bellamy snorts. “If by  _ she seems friendly _ you mean  _ she seems like a judgemental bitch who probably thinks her current surroundings rank below the dogshit on the soles of her designer combat boots in terms of social pecking order  _ then yup, she sure does.”

Miller raises an eyebrow. “If this is how you are with old friends, I can’t wait to see how you and Murphy end up in a few years.”

“One of us’ll probably be dead,” Bellamy grants.

His friend frowns at him, noticing the slurring of his speech for the first time. “Jesus, you’ve been busy,” he nods towards Bellamy’s drink.

“Yeah well, it’s been a  _ week _ ,” he grumbles with distaste.  

Miller looks doubtful. “You sure you’re good?”

Bellamy snorts. “I’m  _ fine _ .” He pats Miller on the shoulder. “Also, can you see a trashcan anywhere?”

“Uh… yeah, right there. Why?”

“Cool,” Bellamy says, making his way over to it. And then he promptly pukes right into it. 

*

Clarke isn’t surprised that she still knows the way to the bookstore, it would be harder to forget. It takes her longer to get there than it would have done once, but that’s less to do with not knowing where to go and more to do with the fact that she has Bellamy--so inebriated he can barely stand--leaning on her the whole way.

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” he says, “didn’t ask for help.”

“And I didn’t volunteer,” she snipes, so “we’re even.”

“You know, no one ever believed me. Back in school. I’d be like.  _ Clarke can be a complete dick _ . And they were all  _ what? Clarke? Nooooo she’s so  _ polite!  _ Such a well-brought up girl _ ! But look at you now--” he prods her shoulder.

She doesn’t say anything, just disentangles herself from him as they reach the front of the Second Dawn Bookstore. “You got the keys?” she asks.

Even drunk as he is, Bellamy treasures those keys like they’re the whole world, which to him, granted, they probably are. He fishes them out of the inside pocket of his jacket, fumbles with them until he gets the door unlocked with a triumphant huff.

Clarke isn’t expecting the sudden pulse of nostalgia, somehow, and it hits her like a brick. It’s the smell, more than anything, the warm musty aroma of old books and coffee grinds that always lingers in here. 

Behind her, Bellamy collapses on the old window seat that was always his favourite spot. 

“Here,” she pulls out the water bottle she’d had the wherewithal to snag from the vending machine when a harried Raven, still attempting to shepherd Luna around, had grabbed her and demanded she take an, in Raven’s words, “excessively upchucking” Bellamy back home. “Drink this.”

“Thanks, Princess,” he says, a little absently, taking the bottle from her. 

Unbidden, another memory rises to the surface of Clarke’s recollection--the first time she got drunk, on a half-empty bottle of vodka pilfered from her parents’ liquor cabinet, Bellamy had had to all but carry her to the same window seat he was now on, grinning at her even as he brushed the sweaty strands of hair off her forehead.

“I feel so  _ warm _ ,” she’d mumbled, wriggling around as he covered her in an old Afghan, “and  _ you _ . You’re  _ so  _ warm.”

“It’s  _ hot _ , Princess. The word you’re looking for is  _ hot _ .” He’d given her that idiotic smirk and then spent the evening making sure she stayed hydrated, taken an aspirin, and eaten something greasy.

“Tell me something,” Bellamy says, bringing her back to the present. The bottle is empty now, she moves to go fill it from the tap in the little bathroom. 

“Yeah?” she calls back over her shoulder. “And is this going to be a quick something? Because I do actually have a life to get back to.”

He chuckles, but it sounds like he’s laughing at something else. “Did you miss me?”

She blinks, hands him the bottle again to give herself a minute before answering. He doesn’t take his eyes off her as he drinks. 

“Even a little?”

What to say to that? Sure, she could tell him about the early days, just after she left, she could tell him exactly what she’d felt, how she didn’t think she could feel anything worse in the world. But what would be the point? That was then, and she clearly has felt worse things, and he doesn’t get to hear her talk feelings, not anymore. 

“You know what they say,” she picks up her bag, “out of sight, out of mind. Enjoy the hangover.”

*

Miraculously, it’s a full week before anyone asks the question. Okay, maybe it’s not that miraculous given that Clarke goes out of her way to avoid interacting with anyone that might remember her--and, more to the point, remember  _ him _ \--but it still blindsides her. 

She runs into Raven in the parking lot of the WalMart and takes a steadying breath to remind herself not to hide. She really does regretting cutting off Raven the way she did, but it just seemed like the easiest option until it wound up being the only option. 

“Hey,” Raven falls in step next to her, “how’s it going?”

“Fine,” she says, trying to sound conversational, “how’ve you been?”

Raven talks about the garage for a while, complains about some random hippy flea market Luna made her drive her to that weekend. 

Clarke’s just letting herself relax, assuring herself that things are going  _ well _ when Raven asks “so how’s Wells doing?”

It takes everything Clarke has not to freeze in her steps then and there, not to succumb to the mounting buzz of panic in her head. 

“He’s fine,” she says quickly, “he’s doing a foreign exchange program for the summer.”

“Oh, nice!” Raven pauses. “How’re you doing with that?”

She stiffens. “What do you mean?”

“Just, you know, you two were always attached at the hip. I figured you’d do summer together too.”

_ So did I  _ she thinks,  _ so did my mom and Thelonious. So did Wells.  _ “Ah, you know,” she gives a one-shouldered shrug as she opens the backdoor of her car and dumps the grocery bags in there, “it was too good an opportunity for him to pass up.”

Raven nods slowly. “Well, cool. I’ll catch you later.”

Clarke waits till Raven’s out of sight before she lets herself slump down in the driver’s seat, burying her face in her hands. The lie slipped out easily, and Clarke can’t bring herself to regret it. The shock of hearing someone else talk about him, ask after him because to them, he was still alive… 

She turns the ignition on and exhales carefully. It’s the first time someone’s asked, but it won’t be the last. But at least now she knows she can handle it. She’s doing fine.

Callie, apparently, disagrees. 

“This has gone on long enough,” she says to Clarke at dinner.

“What has?”

“All this…” she gestures at Clarke with her fork, “this wasting away to nothing. Honey, you just wander about all day, it’s like--”

She cuts herself off abruptly, but Clarke guesses her meaning easily enough.  _ It’s like  _ I’m  _ the one that died _ . She focuses on cutting up her chicken into smaller and smaller pieces. 

“I know you need time to feel better, sweetie, I get that, I do,” Callie frowns, “but a smart girl like you can’t just sit around with nothing to focus that clever mind of yours on.”

Clarke wants instinctively to protest but bites her lip, thinks for a moment. There is a part of her, and not an unsubstantial one, that wants to tell Callie to get lost and let her wallow in peace. It’s tempting. But there’s another little whisper, that murmur of reason that sounds a lot like Wells, who points out that keeping busy can’t be a bad thing. Historically, Clarke doesn’t do well with sitting idle. It makes her antsy and tense; she’s notoriously bad at relaxing. Having something to do all day besides trying not to remember may not be the worst idea in the world. 

“Okay,” she says slowly, “I see what you’re saying.”

Callie looks startled, but recovers quickly, her face breaking out into a broad smile. “Good. That’s excellent!”

“I’ll start looking for jobs tomorrow, I guess?”

Callie’s practically clapping with glee now. “Actually,” she says, “you don’t have to. I’ve set one up for you.”

“What?” Clarke feels herself tense up. “You set me up a job? What job?”

“Relax, sweetie,” Callie says, pulling up the relevant email on her phone, “it’s perfect for you. You’re going to love it!”

Clarke takes the phone warily, then glances down at it. The subject line and sender catch her eye immediately, the logo printed under the signature is all too familiar.

Oh no.

Oh no, this is bad.

This is very,  _ very _ bad.

*

**_August 2013_ **

@RavenTheRiveter52: _ sorry man do you want some aloe for that BURN? _

@TheHG: _ I’m gonna be honest, I expected more sophisticated insults from Arkadia High’s resident genius _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ wait wtf _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ i mean _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ i AM a genius _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ but how do you know i go to AHS? _

@TheHG:  _ I’ve hacked your cameras and watch you everyday _

@TheHG:  _ That was 100% a joke btw _

@TheHG:  _ I see now that an anonymous internet weirdo making stalker jokes isn’t actually funny _

@TheHG:  _ Ah damn _

@TheHG:  _ Sorry :/ _

@RavenTheRiveter52: _ jfc calm down bud _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ as if you could actually hack my cameras w/out me seeing _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ real talk tho you never answered _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ how tf do u know who i am?? _

@TheHG:  _ It’s really not that exciting _

@TheHG: _ I’m an AHS student too _

@TheHG:  _ And you’re kind of  a big deal round campus _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ the bIGGESt deal _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ ok that was lols _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ now who are you? _

@TheHG:  _ The guy who you just eviscerated at this game _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ nah there are so many of those imma need more deetz xoxo _

@TheHG:  _ Trust me, I’m pretty sure it’ll be more fun for both of us if we DON’T let on that anything’s wrong and just continue acting oblivious _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ BOo _

@TheHG:  _ I promise I’m not that exciting _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ im gonna hound you until the mystery is solved _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ i will resort to illegal methods don’t think i won’t _

@TheHG:  _ Come on now Raven _

@TheHG:  _ i believe in you!! :P _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ omfg did you just use an emoticon _

@TheHG: _ ... yeah? Is this a trick question? _

*

**_Present Day_ **

Bellamy is surprised when Kane walks into the store beaming. Kane is hardly ever effusive enough to be described as  _ beaming _ . 

“Hey,” Bellamy says, squinting a little suspiciously. “What’s up?”

“You remember I was telling you I was looking for a temporary hire? Just for the summer?”

Bellamy nods. He vaguely recalls Kane talking about taking on a temp to help catalogue and reshelve over the break. He wouldn’t mind some help around the place personally, but he’s naturally wary of people infringing on what he thinks of as  _ his  _ space. He’s worked here at least part-time for most of his life, this place is his  _ baby _ . He doesn’t like the idea of some apathetic tweenager morons lurking around here with their grimy hands and general poor hygiene. 

“You found someone?” he asks.

Kane nods, looking about as close as he ever looks to gleeful. Considering the last time he looked this excited, it was for the Polis Farmer’s Market, which had been its own special kind of disaster that culminated in Bellamy getting fed some dangerously undercooked kebabs and being sick for a week, Bellamy’s a little wary. 

“I think you’ll like my pick.”

“Uh. Okay. Who is it?”

Kane smiles. “It’s Clarke Griffin. Did you know she’s back in town for summer?” 

He keeps on going, talking about how he ran into Callie Cartwig on the street and they began reminiscing about all the time the kids used to spend together, and how he filled her in on how the bookshop was doing, and he’d mentioned they were hiring, and--

Bellamy swallows. “Okay,” he says again.

Marcus still looks pleased with himself. “You two will enjoy catching up, I’m sure.”

“We’re here to work, Kane,” he points out mildly, the edge to his voice just audible, “not chit-chat.”

He nods. “Of course, and I know you’ll both take your jobs here seriously. You know we need to push a bit harder this summer.”

Bellamy doesn’t respond right away. He’s not an idiot. He knows how Second Dawn Bookstore’s doing financially; it doesn’t surprise him. Not everyone lives and breathes books the way he does, as sad and empty as that means their lives must be. 

“What’s her position going to be?” he asks.

Marcus shrugs. “It’s pretty much up to you, you’re very much a de-facto manager, as you well know.” He laughs, stopping when Bellamy doesn’t join in. 

“There’s cataloguing to be done,” he says eventually, “general admin-y stuff. She’ll probably be good at that. We can put her on the till as well.” They’ve needed someone on till ever since Octavia categorically refused to keep up her afterschool shifts. 

Kane is watching him now, wariness creeping into his expression. “You’re okay with this, aren’t you?”

_ Doesn’t matter now, does it?  _ “Yup.” The popping of the  _ p  _ hangs in the air. Kane nods, makes his excuses, and disappears upstairs to work on spreadsheets, leaving Bellamy to brace his arms on the counter for a moment. It’s not that he thinks Clarke is going to mess up the bookstore or anything. He doesn’t really believe she’s magically lost her efficiency and generally responsible demeanour, at least not completely over time, but… 

She used to  _ care  _ about this place, maybe even as much as he did. And now she’s back and she’s different, and well-- he can deal with it if she’s forgotten him, whatever, it’s nothing he’s not used to. Clarke, distant and detached at some indeterminate location in Arkadia, that doesn’t bother him. But her,  _ here _ , bored and disinterested, reminding him that everything he cares about is too small and dull and insignificant for her world... 

“What’s got you so emo?” Octavia trudges down the stairs, eating a bag of Skittles. 

“Shop stuff,” Bellamy mutters, “nothing you need to worry about. And I’m not  _ emo _ .”

“Whatever.”

Something in his stomach squirms when he looks at her. He remembers when she was little, she used to like it in here. She was never very much of a reader per se, but she would love sitting on the desk while he worked, or listening to him read aloud to her, or asking him about Legolas and Gimli, Annabeth Chase, Dustfinger, Cathy Moreland, or whichever other character she heard him mention. She used to beg him to play hide-and-seek amongst the shelves after closing time, to ask him why he always sniffed the books as he stacked them, to make him tell her what it would be like to live in Narnia or Stormhold or Earthsea.

He shakes himself. She doesn’t want that anymore, it doesn’t matter if he does. In the back of his mind, Bellamy always figured that she’d outgrow him someday.

“So what is it?” she asks, her tone still barbed as wire, waiting to trap him. “Writer’s block?” She raises an eyebrow.

Bellamy swallows the lump in his throat, pushes past it. “Mock me later, O. I know you have summer homework to do.”

Octavia scoffs. “What’s the point anyway?”

“Education is important,” he snaps.

“Like you would know!” 

And there it is, the killing blow that gets him where it hurts, makes him see red. “Yeah, O! Yeah I do fucking know! I know exactly what education’s worth and I know full damn well that we can’t both go and I know that it’s my responsibility, just like always, to make sure you get your best chance! So you better get upstairs right now and--”

“Oh screw you!” she snaps, “if you’re so cranky about doing shit for me, then don’t! I’ve never asked you to! All I want is for you to get the fuck out of my life and  _ leave me alone _ !”

She storms upstairs, slams the door behind her, a trail of profanities and insults hurled over her shoulder.

Bellamy drops his elbows to the table, burying his head in his hands. He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, but regret doesn’t really help him. She’s pulling away faster than he knows how to deal with.

He’s grateful when a couple of customers show up, thankful to have something to  _ do _ . It’s a hipster looking kid called Ilian looking for some Beatnik stuff and an out-of-towner passing through on a road trip just stretching her legs and browsing. Sometimes, the shop has slow days like this -- though if he’s being honest with himself, the slow days are more common than the regular ones at this point -- and sometimes it’s busier. A few tourists will be in-and-out, looking for some cheap paperbacks to take down to the beach; and come Back-to-School time there’s generally a good number of Ark High students looking for their assigned reading books. They have a few regulars, like Puja, the old lady who runs the Kodak store, and Nyko, the Park Ranger. Their best regular was probably Clarke’s stepdad, Thelonious Jaha -- he’d be in almost every day, capable of staying for hours at a time, always happy to engage Bellamy in a conversation over whichever author he was perusing at the time -- but he’d obviously moved away a few years ago, and like Clarke, doesn’t seem to have looked back towards Arkadia since. 

Clarke. That brings Bellamy back to the most pressing concern. He and Kane had bandied the idea of hiring extra help back-and-forth for a while: they were dealing with so much stock at this point that Bellamy could really use an extra pair of hands. But Kane had always expressed doubt in the value of such a hire, wondering if the shop was bringing in enough revenue to justify doling out another set of wages. Which means the fact that Kane hired Clarke is a good sign. Bellamy believes that. He has to.

*

Raven tries not to let the irritation show on her face as Luna examines yet another chipped bit of seashell, but it’s not like she’s trying very hard.

“Are you sure you don’t want to at least put your feet in?” Luna asks from the rock pool.

She snorts, not looking up from her phone. “Jesus, you’re such a townie.”

“Not really,” Luna contests placidly, “I’ve always loved the sea. Besides, I moved from San Diego, which is just as coastal as Arkadia.” 

“True. In which case,” Raven leans back so she can squint through the sunlight at the girl properly, “I  _ really  _ don’t get why you’re so excited by all this. It’s not going anywhere, plus you’ve had enough ocean to last you a lifetime.”

Luna sighs. “I could spend more than just one lifetime with the ocean.”

Raven doesn’t even try to suppress the roll of her eyes. There’s nothing abhorrently  _ wrong  _ with Luna exactly, but. Well. Raven had ideas about what she’d spend the summer doing, and none of them included babysitting the town’s newest hippie. Besides, it’s not like Luna seems to particularly  _ need  _ a guide anyway -- she seems to have some kind of internal compass that leads her to all the vegan cafés and vintage stores that Raven has never bothered to notice Arkadia even has. 

She opens up Twitter on her phone, refreshing the DMs a few times to see if anything new has come in yet. There are a couple of unread messages from a few of her video game or incoming CalTech freshmen mutuals, but nothing from @TheHG, or just Jay as she’s taking to referring to him. He told her it’s not his real name, but it’s easier than thinking about him in terms of a Twitter handle the whole time. She scrolls up-and-down the conversation in boredom a few times, messages and gifs and screenshots blurring into a colourful stream as she does so, before eventually rereading the last few messages they’d exchanged for the umpteenth time.

@TheHG:  _ Why in God’s name would you send me that? _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ why not _

@TheHG:  _ I only like wholesome memes _

@TheHG:  _ You know this _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ i do _

@TheHG:  _ And yet _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ come on whats not wholesome about winnie the pooh? _

@TheHG:  _ NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS WHOLESOME?? _

@TheHG:  _ WHY ARE THEY DRAWN LIKE THAT _

@TheHG:  _ WHY DOES PIGLET HAVE A WIFE _

@TheHG:  _ AND WHY IS SHE PREGNANT? _

@TheHG:  _ AND WHY IS POOH ROBBING HIM WHAT IS HAPPENING? _

@RavenTheRiveter52: _ 1\. don’t raise your voice at me sir  _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ 2\. artistic license  _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ 3\. he was lonely  _

@RavenTheRiveter52: _ 4\.  _ [ _ http://www.newkidscenter.com/How-Are-Babies-Made.html _ ](http://www.newkidscenter.com/How-Are-Babies-Made.html)

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ 5\. desperation _

@TheHG:  _ You’re kind of an asshole, you know that? _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ you love it tho _

@TheHG:  _ I hate when you’re right _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ i am ALWAYS right just accept it jay _

@TheHG:  _ About that. I wanted to talk to you about something. _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ smthg im right about?? _

@TheHG:  _ No, the fact that Jay isn’t my name _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ you did ask me to call you that but go off i guess _

@TheHG:  _ Omg Raven will you let me finish _

@TheHG:  _ I’m saying I want to tell you who I am _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ oh _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ holy shit _

@RavenTheRiveter52: _ wow really? _

@TheHG:  _ Yeah _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ and?? _

@TheHG:  _ Not on here _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ wtf??? why not??? _

@TheHG:  _ You’ll laugh at me if I tell you _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ possibly but you won’t be able to hear me _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ whyyyyyyyy _

@TheHG:  _ I want to make a grand  gesture okay? _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ like… make a statement? _

@TheHG:  _ Yeah. Nothing too crazy but _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ but what?  _

@TheHG:  _ I want it to be special _

@TheHG:  _ Is that okay? If this is too weird just tell me and I’ll stop _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ no _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ it’s fine _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ it’s good _

And that had been it. Jay hasn’t been back online for ages. Is she being ghosted? Did he break his phone and laptop and all other access points to the internet and fail to fix anything? Raven shoves the phone away with a huff. She’s far from dumb; she’s always been aware that Jay could turn out the be a 65-year-old kinky grandma or something. But she doesn’t believe it. She’s got every antivirus software under the sun rigged up and she can sniff out catfish like a bloodhound. She believes Jay is real. And she has no damn clue who he is. 

*

Clarke spends a full two minutes debating whether or not to knock. On the one hand, there’s no need as she knows full well the door is open and there’s nothing keeping her from walking in. On the other, something about that seems familiar, comfortable in a way she doesn’t really think she is. Eventually she pulls herself together and goes in, the little bell she remembers so well tingling as the door swings open. 

Bellamy looks up, and she feels herself tense.

“Well,” she says, speaking before he can, “you’re definitely more vertical than the last time I saw you.”

He barely reacts to that, refusing to get embarrassed. “You’re late,” he says instead.

She raises an eyebrow. “It’s thirty minutes until the store opens.”

“Yes,” he says, moving out from behind the till, folding his arms across his chest, “but it’s your first day. You need training. You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

Clarke scowls. “Excuse me for not being psychic, but I was never told that.”

He scoffs. “Kane left a message with Callie.”

“But she never told me!”

Bellamy gives her a derisive, mocking sort of smile that sets her teeth on edge. “Well, Princess, until you become capable of managing your own communication, you should probably start checking if she has any messages for you.”

“I can handle my own communication just fine,” Clarke spits.

“Really?” he asks, voice cold. “Because in my experience you’re pretty damn awful at staying in touch.”

The hint of accusation hangs in the air, threatening to simmer over into a full-blown fight.

“Just give me your phone,” Clarke says eventually, holding her hand out for it and punching her number in. “There. You happy now?”

“Ecstatic. Now follow me so I can show you the ropes.”

The conversation fizzles as Bellamy shows her the way round -- he’s being overly thorough just to ruffle her feathers, meticulously pointing out each shelf and genre as if she doesn’t have it committed to memory. They move through the back of house stuff lethargically, Bellamy acting like the room where they store the overflow of books  _ isn’t  _ his personal treasure-chest, Clarke pretending she doesn’t remember the time she got locked in the restroom during a game of hide-and-seek and had to wait for help for three hours while Bellamy kept her company, talking to her from the outside.

“It’s going to be a slow day today,” Bellamy tells her, “so we’re going to work on reorganising the main shelves -- they’re in shambles right now.”

Bellamy assigns her to start with the lower shelves that contain reference books and glossy coffee table volumes. She wonders, briefly, if it’s because he remembers that those were her favourites to go through, if he remembers how she used to spread them on the floor around her and stare at the pictures, sometimes trying to copy them in her sketchbook, but she dismisses it. It’s probably because they’re the heaviest and the most haphazard. 

Bellamy has music playing while they work -- he’s working on the History & Classics shelves, because of course he is -- and she’s grateful. It fills the silence with something other than talking. 

A couple of customers wander in, and Bellamy goes to his spot behind the counter, instantly sliding on his easy, relaxed charm. 

“I’m looking for something for my daughter,” one of the customers says, “she’s just gotten through  _ Harry Potter _ .”

“Awesome,” he says, “she must have loved it, right?”   
The woman smiles indulgently. “It’s all she talks about.”

“I know the feeling.”

He definitely does -- he had torn through the series in a matter of months, badgered Clarke until she read the books too, and then they’d spent hours upon hours in the blanket forts they used to build, eating jellybeans and pretending they were Bertie Bott’s, debating which Hogwarts House was the best, and discussing which of the Deathly Hallows they would choose -- and Clarke can’t help a knowing shake of the head as he launches off into a detailed rundown of what exactly is the logical next choice in terms of books to read. 

“If she likes the whole magical school aspect,” he’s saying, pulling books from shelves he knows so well he barely has to look, “she’ll love this one,” he passes her  _ Midnight for Charlie Bone _ , “and  _ Inkheart  _ and  _ Northern Lights  _ are really good fantasy novels as well.” He starts explaining the plot of each book briefly, and Clarke turns back to sorting the coffee table books. There’s one that’s full of old maps of the midwestern United States, another slightly browned one that shows famous statues from around the world, and one… 

Clarke’s fingers slip when she sees the cover of the book she’s just picked up. 

_ The Beauty of Earth’s Oceans _ , it’s called. The cover shows a dolphin breaking the surface of the waves. She opens the book almost against her will, like a girl in a horror flick who can’t help but follow the creepy music. The photos are glossy, sharp, and they all show the sea. Aerial shots, showing endless stretches of blue. Close-ups of foam frosting the edge of cresting waves. Shots from just below the surface, looking at light refracted through the water. Water, water, water, around the camera, around her, around  _ him _ , pulling him in, up his nose and in his throat, no one can see him, hear him, water— 

“Clarke? Hey! Clarke!” 

She jolts back to reality with a sudden gasp as she realises there’s a hand on her shoulder. It takes her a second to recognise the face in front of her, to register the furrowed brow and wide eyes as Bellamy’s.

“It’s good,” he’s saying, “you’re good. Uh, just breathe, okay? That’s it, breathe with me.”

He squeezes her hand tight enough to hurt, but she’s glad -- the pain grounds her. She watches him, breathes in-and-out with him until the world’s slowed back down enough for the tension to leave her shoulders.

“I’m fine,” she says tightly. “Sorry.”

Bellamy’s still watching her closely, not protesting, although his disbelief clouds every lineament of his face. 

“Just…” she waves her hand around, “stuffy.” She coughs. “I’ll get a duster,” she says, standing up quickly. “I think I might be allergic to dust mites. There’s probably several billion dust mites back here -- you know the average mattress can house up to ten million mites? -- so I think a space like this could have exponentially more. Not that cursory dusting will get rid of the mites, exactly, but it can’t hurt.” Clarke knows she’s rambling, talking faster whenever she sees Bellamy open his mouth, but she doesn’t stop talking until she’s retrieved an old, soft cloth from the cleaning cabinet and started attacking the shelves, sending clouds of dust billowing up around her. 

“Clarke…”

“Yell if a customer comes in,” she says shortly,  “I’ll stop dusting, look tidy ‘n stuff.”

There’s a clear dismissal in her voice, and she hears rather than sees Bellamy shake his head and go back to the till to start putting some cash in the register (she hadn’t even noticed the customers pay up and leave). 

It doesn’t sting that he doesn’t try harder to find out what’s wrong; she hardly notices that he doesn’t fret after her the way he once would have. She didn’t expect anything else.

*

Bellamy tells himself he’s not concerned, but even he doesn’t really believe that. 

It’s not like he imagined Clarke was looking forward to this working situation any more than he was, but her episode didn’t seem like it stemmed from simple annoyance. He racks his brains to remember if she’s ever been claustrophobic or anything in the past, anything that could explain what just happened, but he comes up short. He doesn’t hover around her for the rest of the day -- he  _ does  _ remember that she typically doesn’t appreciate being smothered when she’s working through shit -- but when closing time comes, he can’t help himself.

“Clarke,” he says, “you don’t have to tell me details, but…” his eyes flit across her face as he considers what to say for a moment. “You okay?”

She shrugs, a half-smirk hanging precariously on her lips. “Guess we’re even now, huh?”

Bellamy frowns. “Even?”

She nods. “Now we’ve both witnessed each other in the throes of embarrassing meltdowns.”

His frown deepens. “You can’t help panic attacks,” he says softly, and he feels something in his chest twist at the way she seems to crumple a little, “you shouldn’t be embarrassed. Not in front of anyone, but definitely not me.”   
She chews her lip. “Okay,” she says after a moment’s contemplation, “I should -- I should probably get going now.” She nods an awkward goodbye at him and pushes out the door, setting off quickly in the direction of Callie’s house, and he wonders if she can tell that his eyes are trained on her back the whole time she’s leaving.

His initial plan had been to text Miller to come hang out that afternoon, but he hesitates now -- if Miller comes here, he’ll be able to tell something’s bothering Bellamy, and Bellamy won’t be able to tell him what it is because…well, it’s not his to share. 

He turns his attention to checking over the finances again -- a nervous habit carried over from when his mother was alive and he realised that she wasn’t really aware of or concerned about how much money they had left and how she used it -- and it makes him clench his jaw. When he was younger he used to imagine all manner of unlikely things happening in the shop -- a wealthy old rare book collector waltzing in and paying a fortune for a first edition that could be found here and nowhere else, a documentary about the second hand book business being filmed in their shop -- but he’s long since learnt to stop expecting miracles. 

Still, he doesn’t really in his heart of hearts expect things to be as  _ bad  _ as the figures seem to suggest. 

Clarke’s salary isn’t exactly sizeable, but it’s still making a visible dip on their expenses. They’ve spent most of their maintenance budget already, yet the store still looks slightly worn, worn in a way Bellamy finds comforting but most people seem to find dilapidated. The fact is, secondhand book stores aren’t exactly a goldmine as it is, and Second Dawn is barely breaking even. It won’t be long until they’re spending more than they’re earning. He scrubs a hand over his face, makes a record of the day’s profits, and closes the laptop. Then he opens it again. Almost without knowing what he’s doing, he goes to his email and, after a quick type in the search bar pulls up his last email chain with Clarke. 

The last few emails in the chain are dated from about three years ago, but he knows that they hardly count, short, sporadic one-liners that they are. He opens the very first one, the one dated for the day after Clarke left. It’s long and chatty and falsely casual, and he remembers vividly the frantic haze in which he wrote it, the way his throat was closing, threatening tears the whole time because he’d woken up and she’d just  _ gone _ , left with nothing more than a text that he’d stared at for so long he’d committed it to memory -- “had to leave early no time to stop by sorry!! i’ll miss you, talk later x”-- nothing else to indicate that she’d so much as looked back on the friendship he’d thought was so central, as inevitable to them both as breathing. 

He closes the laptop for real this time.

*

Bellamy knew Clarke kept more closely in touch with Raven after she left than she did with him, and it had stung. But it’s just confusing, the fact that the girls seem to be more closely in touch  _ now  _ as well. 

After all, Clarke may have kept up more regular conversations for a longer time with Raven, but he knows they fizzled out too. Yet now he sees Raven and Clarke talking in the street, looking -- well not like  _ friends _ , exactly, but  _ friendly _ . Clarke’s arms are crossed with her hands tucked under them like it’s cold (it’s not), and Raven looks a little more relaxed, leaning against the doorframe of the garage. She’s the one who spots him and waves him down.

“Blake,” she greets him, “I was just telling Clarke she should crash the party.” She turns back to Clarke. “Miller -- you met Miller right? -- has it every summer at his place. It’s really chill, you should join. It’s coming up in a couple of weeks.”

Clarke shrugs. “Thanks, but I don’t want to intrude.”

“Miller won’t care,” he finds himself saying, “if you come along. It’s all up to you Princess.” Raven’s looking at him a little oddly, which he guesses makes sense -- it probably  _ does _ seem odd that his stupid nickname for her outlived their actual friendship.

Meanwhile, Clarke blinks. “Um. Yeah, okay, I guess I could think about it.”

Raven tuts. “Yeah, and then you’ll keep thinking and thinking until you talk yourself right out of it. Yes or no, Clarke?”

She gives a surprised burst of laughter, and it makes Bellamy stare for a moment because it’s the most  _ familiar  _ thing he’s heard from her since she got back. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Great.” Raven’s grin is shark-like. “Now if you kids will excuse me, I actually have to get back to work.” She disappears back into the garage, leaving Bellamy and Clarke standing alone in the street. The silence is awkward, but less tense than it could be, so he counts that as a positive.

“So,” he says, “how’s it going?”

She worries her lip, and he wonders if she notices the wrongness of it as much as she does -- small talk has never really been their thing. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Force yourself to be polite because you saw me having a moment and you feel bad.”

He doesn’t protest straight away, pausing to consider. Is he just being cordial because he feels bad? Bellamy doesn’t  _ think  _ so, or not entirely at least. “You’re giving me too much credit. If I just felt bad, I could just outright avoid you. I don’t  _ have  _ to be here talking to you, you know.”

That pulls a small smile out of her, and something inside him crumbles. It’s still confusing and painful how much he fucking  _ missed her  _ despite the fact that she seems to have outgrown him. But she’s here now; she’s going to be here, in Arkadia, for a while.

Clarke’s fiddling with a loose thread on her shirt, and for the first time she seems to be just as vulnerable as he is in all this. It pushes him to keep talking.

“Look. It’s going to be a long summer, and we’ve got to work together. I would say we could call a truce or whatever, but…” he wets his lips, “don’t you think it would be less painful if we could at least try and be friends?”

She studies him for a moment, her blue eyes piercing as they seem to look for something. “Yeah,” she finally says, “I guess so. Yeah, okay.” 

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

It hangs there for a moment, the agreement.

“Walk you back home?” he offers.

She nods. “Sure.”

They walk in silence, but it’s an easier silence, almost a companionable one.  

“How’s Wells, by the way?” Bellamy asks after a while, more to start some sort of conversation than anything else.

Clarke reaches up to push her hair back out of her face, making the pink ends bounce a little. “He’s fine,” she says, “doing a study abroad thing in Germany.”   
“Cool,” he says. It sounds about right -- Clarke’s stepbrother is as much of a type A overachiever as she is. 

“How’s Octavia?” she asks back.

Bellamy resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose and sink to his knees in stress. “Ah, she’s alright,” he replies, painfully aware that the casual tone he’s going for is coming out very strained, “hitting her rebellious teenage years, y’know?”

Clarke doesn’t say anything for a moment, and when he looks at her he almost startles. Her face is so open, soft with concern, it’s like -- she  _ cares _ . 

“You okay?” she asks him, voice low. 

“Fine.” He looks at her. “I’m glad you’re back,” he tells her as they walk up to Callie’s front door. “I missed you.”

She fumbles with the key in the lock until she pushes the door open. “I missed you too,” she tells him quickly.

They don’t hug when they say goodbye, just nod at one another with little half-smiles. Bellamy didn’t really believe her when she said she’d missed him -- how could he? -- but he lets himself pretend it’s true as he walks away.

*

**_August 2014_ **

 

**From:** bblake1@gmail.com

**To:** griffinclarke@gmail.com

**Subject:** Re: Hey

Hey Princess,

I’m going to need more info than that! Come on, I’m dying here, give me some details please. How does your (really extra) canopy bed fit in there? And is the school one of those really obnoxiously rich Massachusetts Prep schools you read about? Are you studying in a non-magical Hogwarts? Or is it more like a Hailsham-type set-up, but you’re all being reared as future Presidential nominees instead of clones? Is Wells talking even more like a Junior Senator than he does usually?

Arkadia hasn’t changed too drastically, your conspicuous absence aside. We had a massive back-to-school rush in the shop, which was really hectic but cool. Some retired university professor donated a bunch of miscellaneous encyclopediae as well -- Octavia found this one that has all these high definition cross-sections of cells from microscopes that you’d love; I’ve put it aside for when you come back to visit! Any updates on when that will be?

In other news, I’m going out with Roma Johnson again this Saturday. She’s pretty cool, so fingers crossed it goes well (I promise I won’t wear that old henley you always look at funny). It does mean Kane and Octavia will be having some quality time to bond etc., bet you can imagine how excited they both are for that! Kane’s threatening to make it a Scrabble night or something, and Octavia is in turn threatening to live-text me the entire ordeal throughout the whole date, which I guess is fair penance.

Anyway, enough on me, it’s your turn now. Write back soon and send pictures -- I have not forgotten your promise to send me a selfie of you pretending to throw tea into Boston Harbour. You should know by now, Princess, that I forget nothing.

I miss you like crazy and everything is slightly worse without you here, 

COME VISIT ASAP,

Bellamy x

 

**From:** griffinclarke@gmail.com

**To:** bblake1@gmail.com

**Subject:** Re: Hey

Hi Bell,

Sorry, I’m just crazy busy these days, unpacking and settling in and stuff is annoyingly time-consuming. 

The school is pretty much as fancy as you’re imagining so at least my mom’s on brand. 

Idk on visiting yet, everything’s still up in the air, sorry :/ 

Roma sounds nice, go you!!! I’m glad you update me on all the dates and stuff, it feel like I’m still there lol.

And I don’t know Bell, I sometimes think you lean towards selective memory.

Sorry but I have to cut this short again, I’ve got to take the car to get serviced.

Miss you too,

Clarke 

 

**DRAFTS: From:** bblake1@gmail.com

**To:** griffinclarke@gmail.com

**Subject:** Re: Hey

What the fuck, Clarke? Did I do something? Is there a reason your replies are barely more fleshed out than an answering machine message? Which incidentally is something I’ve heard more of than your actual voice since I’ve been trying to call you. Let me guess, mommy’s found you shiny new prep school friends and you can’t schedule time to give a shit about your commoner buddies between croquet on the lawns and orgies with the cabinet or whatever the fuck it is rich people do? Fuck you!

**Send:                                                          Delete: X**

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	2. ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who commented on the first chapter!! It was so encouraging and lovely to see. Also, I have decided to split Chapter 2 into two parts for reasons, thus the change in chapter count. Updates shouldn't be too affected though!

Clarke volunteers to manage the till the next day. It’s not too difficult, once Bellamy shows her how. 

She’s having a hard time figuring out his deal, really. He doesn’t seem to feel particularly  _ bad  _ for crushing her heart into splinters and using them as confetti those years back, but --

She tugs on her shirt collar to loosen it. At the time, it had felt like the worst thing in the world. But now she’s nineteen and cynical and all too aware that when the world throws its worst at you, it makes sure you know it. 

Clarke accidentally catches his eye alongside one of the bookshelves, and he flashes her a quick smile. 

It’s strange, because she really thinks he  _ has  _ missed her, that he  _ has  _ been upset by her absence. She wouldn’t have assumed so, the way he left things, but he seems genuine. And it’s still Bellamy -- she still believes, on some strange cellular level, that she can  _ tell _ if he’s being straightforward. Trying to send her on random guilt trips out of spite doesn’t seem like his style, and neither does asking her to be friends again out of sheer convenience. If she’s honest with herself, well… she wouldn’t mind having a friend again. 

“Check this out,” Bellamy waves a book at her from the shelf he’s reordering, and she goes over to examine it. “I found something in it.”

There’s an old, worn-thin airmail envelope folded inside the book, boasting a little patchwork of faded stamps dated from about twenty years ago. There’s a letter inside, so delicate it’s translucent, and Bellamy’s holding it close to his face so he can squint at it. “It’s kind of hard to make out the words--”

“Your eyes are deteriorating with age.”

“Well everything else is in perfect working order,” he snipes without missing a beat. 

She snorts. “Seriously, did you forget to put your contacts in or something?”

“Maybe,” he grumbles.

She rolls her eyes at him. “Go put them in, I’ll look at this in the meanwhile.” She holds her hand out for the letter, and he passes it to her with a sigh, trudging away to retrieve his lenses from upstairs.

Shaking her head, Clarke examines the letter herself. It  _ is  _ difficult to read, though not as much as Bellamy was finding it. She can make out most of it. It’s not particularly exciting, someone called Gerry writing to his sister about a holiday to France. But she gets the appeal of it, from Bellamy’s point of view -- he’s always loved finding loose ticket stubs and receipts and old scraps of paper tucked away into the books they get donated. 

“It’s the advantage of secondhand,” he used to say, “the stories you’re reading have  _ other people’s  _ stories mixed in with them as well.”

“This is scintillating,” she calls as she hears Bellamy coming back down the stairs, “really riveting stuff--”

She stops short when she sees him. He’s wearing glasses.

“Oh shut up,” he says, but blinks when he sees her staring. “What?”

“Just,” she focuses on a knot in the wood of the checkout desk, prodding at it idly with one finger, “um. I haven’t seen you wear those in a while.”

“Oh. Well, you haven’t seen  _ me  _ in a while.” The words aren’t entirely non accusatory, and they hang in the air for a moment, but Bellamy powers on before they can really land. “I mean, I usually go with the contacts,” he says, “but it was quicker to just get these on.”

“You used to have wireframes,” she says.

He huffs a laugh. “Yeah. I’m leaning more into the hipster vibe,” he taps the thick black frames he’s currently sporting, “seems to fit the aesthetic of this place better.”

She nods. “Well,” she clears her throat, “they suit you.”

“Um. Thanks.” 

The door swings open, and for a second Clarke is relieved that something is interrupting the burgeoning awkwardness, but then she catches sight of Bellamy’s expression and turns around.

She recognises, vaguely, the curly-haired girl who’s walked in. Clarke thinks she was at The Dropship that night. 

“Hi,” the girl says.

“Gina,” Bellamy greets her. 

“I was hoping we could talk. We haven’t really, you know, had a proper conversation about everything yet.”

His eyes flit to Clarke and back. “I’m kind of working right now,” he says.

Gina seems to notice her for the first time. Yeah, that does nothing to make things less weird. 

“Hi,” Clarke says, “I’m Clarke. I’m working here over summer.”

Gina’s eyes show something like recognition. “Oh, cool. I think Bellamy’s mentioned you a few times.”

Clarke studiously avoids looking in Bellamy’s direction.

“I’m Gina,” the girl continues, “I’m uh--”

“My ex-girlfriend,” Bellamy supplies, dry. 

She shoots Clarke a wan sort-of smile before turning back to Bellamy. “I know you’re on shift,” she says, voice low, “but I know you’re not really that busy in here so I’d really like if we could  _ talk _ .” 

He looks like he wants to argue more, but eventually just sighs. “Clarke, can you man the fort out here for a while?” 

Clarke nods, and Bellamy holds open the door to the staircase for Gina to follow him through.

*

**_June 2014_ **

**Wells:** um

**Wells:** hi

**Wells:** HEY

**Clarke:** wtf 

**Clarke:** why are you even awake rn??

**Wells:** The early bird catches the worm

**Clarke:** why are you texting me

**Clarke:** i’m literally in the next room

**Wells:** I don’t feel like moving lol

**Wells:** BUT THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT

**Clarke:** okay??

**Wells:** Are you going to talk about last night or nah?

**Clarke:** idk what you mean

**Wells:** Give it a rest

**Wells:** I saw you

**Clarke:** oh

**Clarke:** well i haven’t actually talked about it w bell yet

**Clarke:** so idk what to say rly

**Wells:** When are you gonna talk about it though??

**Wells:** I mean

**Wells:** We literally leave tomorrow

**Clarke:** I’m working on it okay?

**Wells:** What is there to work on exactly? Just TALK

**Clarke:** I’m trying to make it meaningful okay

**Clarke:** I just

**Clarke:** I want it to feel 

**Clarke:** ughhh

**Clarke:** idek 

**Clarke:** like significant i guess

**Clarke:** idk i just feel like??? this could actually go well?? 

**Clarke:** so if we do become a thing

**Clarke:** i just think it’d be nice if i made it kind of 

**Clarke:** romantic?? 

**Wells:** Yeah?

**Clarke:** yeah

**Clarke:** now chill

**Clarke:** you are waaaay too invested

**Clarke:** you fckn weirdo

**Wells:** send pictures when you’ve done whatever it is you’re doing

**Clarke:** _ seen 03:17 _

*

“I’m going to be honest,” Bellamy says, “I don’t really know why we’re here. I don’t feel like we had a lack of closure or anything.”

Gina sighs. “I don’t like how we left things,” she says, “it felt…unresolved.”

“You mean you felt like the bad guy, and you don’t like it,” he says as gently as he can. He doesn’t really feel angry when he looks at her -- there’s some sadness, because whatever else happened, he did care about her. His time with Gina…those are  _ good  _ memories, calm and happy and easy, and he’s going to regret losing that part. 

But Bellamy hasn’t got the type of life that gives him the luxury to wallow. 

“I feel like I came off a little harshly,” she offers, twisting her hands together. 

“You were delivering a breakup speech,” he replies, “I think you were supposed to.”

She laughs a little, nervous. “Look, Bellamy, I think you’re a wonderful person. And I don’t want there to be any hard feelings between us.”

“There aren’t,” he says, somewhere between frustrated and amused, “I’ve told you before. If you were unhappy in the relationship, you were well within your rights to end it. I don’t hold that against you.”

“I wasn’t  _ unhappy  _ exactly,” she says, “just…”

“You wanted to move forward, and I was going to be stuck here forever?”

Gina frowns. “I’m sorry. I was out of line, saying that.”

He shrugs. “You meant it though.”

“No,” she protests, “I didn’t! I just meant…” She presses her fingers to her her mouth for a moment as she thinks. “You’re a smart, capable guy. But you’re not interested in moving beyond…this.” She gestures vaguely at the door opening into the store. “You and I both know the store isn’t making what you need it to,” she says. “But you won’t even think about moving on from it. Selling up. Doing  _ something _ .”

He doesn’t really have anything to say to that, but what is there to say really? It’s not like she’s  _ wrong _ \-- he has no intention of moving on from the store. His life’s not on any kind of upward trajectory. He can’t hold it against her, wanting to be rid of that.

“Besides,” she continues, “I leave soon.”

Bellamy nods -- she’s headed to Chicago for college at the end of summer. “Long-distance is tough,” he concedes, “especially if your heart’s not in it.”

She looks a little unhappy, but doesn’t say anything because, again, it’s not like he’s wrong either. 

“I hope we can still be friends?” she offers, and then smiles a little wanly like she knows how awkward she sounds.

“Of course,” he says, “and seriously, good luck at college. You’ll do great.”   
“Thanks.” She reaches out to squeeze his shoulder briefly. “And I wish you the best in whatever you do.”

They hug quickly and he waves as she leaves the store. 

Clarke, he notices as he comes back, has been doing the thing where she studiously does  _ not  _ pay attention in a way that he knows means she’s probably overheard most of the conversation and probably taken note of everything that’s just transpired.

“You gonna ask about it or nah?”

She pauses where she’s typing something on the desk computer. “Not sure there’s much to ask.” She wets her lips. “Ex?”

“Yep.” He shrugs. “We broke up a little before the start of summer.” 

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“I’m sorry,” she says in a low voice.

“There’s no tragic backstory or anything. It happens.”

Clarke shakes her head, smiling to herself.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, seriously. What?”

“Just.”

He skirts around so he’s behind the front desk. “Just  _ what _ ?”

“Trust you to be so… okay. When it’s you.”

“I’d be okay if this was happening to  _ anyone _ .”   
“Remember when Octavia’s first ever boyfriend broke up with her? And you threatened to  _ mince him _ ?”

“Yeah, well, Atom was a punk!”

“He was  _ nine _ ! They quote-unquoted  _ dated  _ for three days!”

“He made her cry!”

She stares at him for a second and then her face cracks into a grin, and then she’s laughing. 

After a moment, he joins in. 

“But seriously,” she says after a moment, when they’re both grinning, “you okay?”

“I’m good,” he says. And when she squeezes his hand and smiles at him, he almost means it.

*

Octavia is almost silent when she ambles down the stairs, meaning Clarke jumps when she sees her. 

“Hey,” she says, a little awkward. She and Octavia were pretty close, back in the day, but it was a closeness borne more out of a mutual love for Bellamy than from actually having anything in common or going out of their way to spend time together. Clarke doesn’t know how Octavia feels towards her right now, but remembering how she used to look at her brother like he hung the moon, how fiercely loyal she was to him, Clarke doubts that the younger girl’s feelings are  _ kind _ .

Octavia doesn’t say anything for a moment, just regards her, detached, while she snacks on a granola bar. “Hey. Where’s my brother?”

“Oh.” Clarke pauses. “He’s piling stock in the back.”

Octavia sighs. “Gina didn’t come by? I ran into her at Grounders the other day and she said she might.”

Clarke just shrugs, doing her best to look impassive. “I think she was here yesterday.”

“They used to date,” Octavia says.

Clarke hums noncommittally -- she’s not about to gossip about Bellamy’s love life with his kid sister.

“Don’t you wanna know what happened?” Octavia leans in, eyebrow raised as she smirks a little.

“I want to respect his privacy,” she answers mildy. “So. How’ve you been?” The question hangs awkwardly for a moment, the space of four years making it glaringly obvious how much absence and unknown separate the two girls. 

Octavia shrugs. “Bored as fuck.” 

Clarke manages a smile, but there’s something jarring about this interaction. Last time Clarke saw her, Octavia was a little kid, a bit sassy sure, but generally excited and curious and prone to trailing after Bellamy like he was some sort of Pied Piper. “Have you tried taking up a hobby or something?” she offers, trying for a lighter tone than she thinks she lands.

Octavia just rolls her eyes. “Yeah, that’ll help. You’re lucky, you know.”

“How so?”

“You got out of this crappy little town.”

“I came back,” she points out, trying to look like most of her focus is on the till.

“God knows why,” Octavia snorts, “I’d have never looked back. But Boston must have been cool, right?”

Clarke offers a one-shouldered shrug. “I really liked it. The city’s great, there’s a lot of historical architecture around--”

Octavia gives her a conspiratorial grin. “Bell’s not here, you know, you can skip the geeky stuff.”

“I find it interesting,” Clarke says, leveling her gaze at Octavia.

The younger girl just shrugs again. “Anyway, I think I wanna go to New York. Maybe LA, but I’d prefer East Coast. Anywhere with a  _ pulse _ , you know? Arkadia’s just so dead. The city seems more alive.”

Clarke has to turn away for a second so Octavia can’t see her, to squeeze her eyes shut for a second and make sure her breath stays even. “You’re kind of young for the restless wanderlust to be hitting, aren’t you?”

That gets a scowl from her. “Ugh, you sound just like Bell. He keeps telling me to  _ hang tight  _ and  _ retain focus  _ and stuff so that I can eventually get into a good school and that’ll be my  _ ticket upwards _ .” She looks disgusted. “I’m pretty sure he’s just projecting, cuz he’s bitter that  _ he  _ can’t go.”

That makes Clarke pause for a moment to try process it. “What?”

Before Octavia has a chance to say anything, the backroom door opens, and Bellamy walks out dusting his hands off on his jeans. 

“Hey O,” he smiles when he sees her, wrapping his arm around her in a hug that she accepts rather than returns. “How was your day?”

She shrugs. “Average.”

“You had your Spanish quiz today right? How’d it go?”

“You  _ know  _ I had the quiz,” she grumbles, “since you asked me like fourteen times this morning. It was fine, whatever. It’s not a big deal, it’s not gonna bring my grade down.”

Clarke’s gaze flicks to Bellamy -- his brow is furrowed and he looks like he wants to say something, but he purses his lips and swallows instead. 

“Hey, um, there was a call earlier from Mr Lemkin,” Clarke says, “asking about a couple of children’s books he had on hold -- you know where they are?”

Bellamy blinks, as though brought back to life suddenly, shaking his head a little. “What? Oh, uh, yeah, I’ll show you.”

“Bye, Octavia,” she says, hoping she doesn’t sound too pointed.

“See you round,” the girl says as she spins around and makes her way up the stairs two-at-a-time.

“Don’t forget to start your History project,” Bellamy calls after her, though his voice is tentative.

There’s no response, just the muffled sound of a door being slammed shut. 

Clarke looks at Bellamy again. He’s not facing her, but his shoulders are hunched, slightly tense.

“This is where we keep on-hold books,” he says, marching towards a small shelf, reaching for a small pile of picture books tied together with a string, “the post-its tell you who it’s being held for.” He slams the pile on the tabletop, wincing a little when the sound echoes.

Clarke nods. “Okay. Thanks.” She pauses for a moment before speaking. “So. Octavia’s shot up since the last time I saw her.”

“Yeah well a lot of things have changed since the last time you were here,” he says sharply.

She flinches slightly. “Right.” 

Behind her, she hears Bellamy moving heavily round the store, pulling books out and shoving them into new spots seemingly at random.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” he spits violently. 

She glances over her shoulder at that, and sees one of the books he’s shoved has been bent accidentally so that a couple of the pages as well as the front cover are creased. 

He looks at it as though slightly stunned. She’s not surprised -- considering the amount of times he used to whine about her penchant for dog-earing over using bookmarks, this must sting. 

“Just, uh,” he wipes a face over his hand, then goes through each creased page and folds the paper the other way, pressing it down for a second before releasing it, “can you just sandwich that between two of the encyclopediae? Leave it there for a while to flatten the folds down.”

She takes it from him wordlessly. 

“Sorry I snapped,” he mumbles while she pulls a couple of heavy books from one of the boxes, her fingers faltering slightly as they flutter quickly over   _ The Beauty of Earth’s Oceans _ .

“It’s fine,” she says, placing the book between  _ Gray’s Anatomy  _ and an old Merriam-Webster dictionary. “Where do you want me to leave these?” She hefts the stack slightly.

“Just behind the counter’s fine.”

It’s only later, when she’s sitting down for dinner with Callie that Clarke realises she never asked Bellamy about what Octavia had said, about him not going to college. It doesn’t matter though, she thinks. She doesn’t think there’d been much room for conversation anyway.

*

**_January 2017_ **

@TheHG:  _ Happy New Year! _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ thx!!! but dude why are you spending your first minute of the new year on *twitter*?? _

@TheHG:  _ Why are you? _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ touché _

@TheHG:  _ Seriously though, hope this years a great one for you, and I hope you’re celebrating it with people you love. _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ well _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ im with my mom _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ so _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ you know _

@TheHG:  _ Look I know you don’t have to listen to my two cents on your personal situation _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ but?? _

@TheHG:  _ But I’m going to try offer my two cents anyway, the advantage of communicating over DMs being that if you dislike where what I’m saying is going, it’s super easy to ignore me. _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ noted _

@TheHG:  _ You don’t need me to tell you how awesome you are. You already know how smart and strong and generally incredible you are, you know it and you flaunt it and I love that about you. But I don’t think reminding you would hurt. Your mom may not see that, and it may not even be her fault. Maybe she’s trying so hard to chase her own shadows she’s forgotten how to look at the sun anymore. But it doesn’t matter. _

@TheHG:  _ Whatever it is that’s going with your mom, that’s on her. I’m not saying you have to blame her for it and abandon her to her own problems. But I’m saying to remember that however much we love our parents, when it comes down to it, they’re only human. _

@TheHG:  _ And some people take being human harder than others do. Not you, Raven, you take being alive and make it your bitch.  _

@TheHG:  _ I guess what I’m trying to say is, you’re kind of like the universe, and your mom is like the tiny fleck it Big Bang-ed out of. Maybe you’re only here because of her, maybe you feel like you owe her something for being alive. But even if that’s true, the fleck can’t encompass the universe now, not when the universe is vaster and more infinite and ever-growing than anything the fleck could understand. _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ i think some of that made sense _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ even if your understanding of the big bang theory is sketchy at best _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ thank you _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ for always being there _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ and for -- i know i don’t really _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ but i like that it feels like i have you _

@TheHG:  _ you do _

@TheHG:  _ have me _

@TheHG:  _ you always will _

@RavenTheRiveter52:  _ happy new year x _

*

Raven winces as she stretches her bad leg out, attempting to get comfortable on the sand. This is exactly the type of activity she doesn’t understand, mainly because it’s  _ not  _ an activity. Sunbathing and lazing about on the beach are to her nothing more than extended periods of inaction, and inaction makes her antsy. 

“You seem like you’re overthinking this.” 

She glances up at Luna with one eye open, feels her gaze snag when she sees Luna is in the process of unravelling her sarong to reveal a green bikini. Raven scowls and closes her eyes, feeling inexplicably more grumpy. 

“I’m not overthinking anything. How can I when there’s nothing to think  _ about _ ?”

Luna laughs. “Is it so awful not to be pushing that brilliant brain of yours to breaking point all the time? You know no one’s going to think you’re any less brilliant if you’re not all-guns-blazing all the time.”

It throws Raven off, how lightly and easy Luna is able to just  _ say  _ these things -- even now, the girl is humming while rubbing sunscreen on, unselfconscious. 

“I’m just  _ bored _ ,” Raven mutters, but she doesn’t think the barb lands.

“Aren’t you going to come in?” Luna asks, smirking a little like she knows the question will be met with a cranky dismissal.

“No thanks.” 

Luna shrugs and picks her way delicately across the sand and into the water. Raven regards her, watches the way she doesn’t hesitate or test the temperature of the sea before gliding into the water. 

“You’re gonna freeze your ass off,” Raven yells.

Luna just laughs. “I’m made of sterner stuff than you realise. It’ll take more than a little cold to get to me.” She dips her head under water for a second, and when she reemerges, little droplets of salt water are scattered through her curls like crystals. Raven looks away.

She tries to settle back into the sand and close her eyes to relax in the sunlight, but her leg is bothering her. It gets stiff sometimes, when she’s been working bent over car engines for too long. 

She tries to pretend to be dozing when she sees Luna picking her way back across the beach, but it must not work, because the other girl pauses above her and asks: “What happened?”

“What do you mean?” Raven asks, slinging an arm across her eyes to keep the sun out.

“Your leg,” she hears Luna spreading a towel and lowering herself onto the ground next to her, “you always carry it like it hurts you. What happened to it?”

Raven removes her arm to squint at Luna. There’s no trace of the hushed embarrassment that people usually have when they ask about her injury. No signs of sympathy either; Luna just looks at her, expression completely neutral. Raven doesn’t know whether to be offended or impressed.

“Car accident,” she says slowly, “that dumbass Murphy was driving drunk…” she swallows. “At least it wasn’t worse.”

“That doesn’t make your pain any less,” Luna says, a slight frown colouring her features now, “the fact that it could have been worse.”

Raven shrugs.

“Turn around,” Luna says, somewhat unexpectedly.

“What?”

“If you let me massage the base of your spine,” she says, “I think I can relieve some of the strain on your leg.”

“ _ What _ ?” Raven splutters, “no! I’m not gonna let you-- you don’t need to-- that’s completely unnecessary! How do you even know what to do?”

Luna looks completely placid. “My neighbour was a masseuse back home. She taught me some stuff.”

“That’s not--” Raven just shakes her head, the idea leaving her flustered for some reason.

“If you don’t want to, then don’t,” Luna shrugs, “but I do think it will help.”

Raven wants to keep arguing, but Luna’s passive acceptance means she’s quickly running out of steam. Eventually, she huffs out a breath, twisting herself carefully around, wincing as she adjusts her leg. 

“Fine,” she says, “have at it.”

Much to her alarm, Luna swings one leg over so that she’s essentially straddling Raven’s back. She’s on her knees and completely upright, so it’s not like there’s any actual contact, but Raven is suddenly very conscience that her bikini now means Luna has access to an uninterrupted expanse of bare skin. 

_ What the fuck _ she mouths to no one in particular.

Luna starts working a not at the base of Raven’s spine with firm, gentle hands. It feels  _ good _ , Raven is forced to admit, like a tight spring is being uncoiled. 

“Are we gonna talk or just… lie here?”

Luna hums. “Would you like to talk?”

Raven huffs. “It’s not that I’d  _ like  _ to talk it just feels weird to sit here in silence.”

“I wouldn’t call this silent,” Luna muses, “the waves never stop singing.”

“You’re aware you talk like some kind of immortal hippy witch, right?” Raven says, “none of the sentences that come out of your mouth sound normal.”

“Have you considered the fact that to me,  _ you’re  _ the one that sounds abnormal?”

“That’s just because my brain is so awesome that other people don’t always understand me,” Raven says.

“How do you know I’m not the same?”

“A brain as awesome as mine isn’t a common occurrence.”

Luna chuckles softly, and Raven can’t tell if it actually sounds like a sea breeze, or if the real sea breeze that’s blowing right now is just mingling with it. 

Luna must work a particularly sore area, because Raven lets out a superbly embarrassing sort-of whine and clamps her mouth quickly shut.

“Is it working?” Luna asks.

“Warn a girl!” she spits, feeling hot and irritated for some reason. 

Luna is quite for a moment, and Raven almost feels bad, but then the other girl speaks again. “If I annoy you so much,” she sounds pensieve and unbothered, “why do you continue to hang out with me?”

The unbothered directness of the question disconcerts Raven, and the fact that it disconcerts her is even more disconcerting -- Raven’s usually the one using bluntness to throw people off; being on the receiving end is unnerving.

“You don’t  _ annoy  _ me,” she mutters instead of an actual response.

“Mmhmm.”

“I just feel like we don’t necessarily. You know. We’re not the kind of people that would typically spend our time together. Because our personalities aren’t what most people would consider compatible.” She winces -- Raven isn’t typically a rambler. 

“Alright,” Luna sounds amused, like she sees Raven squirming, but doesn’t press her about her flimsy excuses, “so if our personalities are so incompatible, why do you persist in spending time with me?”

Raven feels a steadily growing sense of alarm -- nothing, it would seem, is capable of alarming this girl.

“Well,” she tosses her head to face the other way, moving her jaw to loosen the cheek that had been pressed into the sand, “your parents asked mine to tell me to show you round.”

“Raven,” Luna says, “I think we both know you could have ticked that duty off after a brief tour of the town. You’ve become my personal tour guide for the summer instead.” Luna pushes her thumbs into the divots of Raven’s lower back, right above her bikini bottom, causing her to hiss in sharp relief. And alarm. 

“My leg feels better now,” she says quicky; Luna slips herself neatly off and helps Raven turn over. “Anyway, I told you. My parents asked me to stick with you so I did, it’s not that deep.”

Luna sighs. “Maybe not. But I think if this was as arduous as you like to suggest, you wouldn’t bother sticking with it. Not to please me, and certainly not to please your parents.”

“What, you think you’re some kind of psychic for working out my parents and I aren’t close? Because it really doesn’t take a genius to draw that conclusion.”

“I’m just saying,” Luna turns to pull a pair of sunglasses from her beach bag, “as little as you may enjoy spending your summer hanging out with me, I think there’s a reason you haven’t gotten out of it.”

“What,” Raven sounds sour even to herself, “you think I secretly just  _ love  _ your company?”

“I think you’re lonely,” Luna says.

That makes Raven stiffen. “The hell kind of conclusion is that? I think the seawater’s pickled your mind.”

Luna’s expression, Raven can’t help but note, has shed the vaguely dreamy softness somewhere along the way; it’s solidified into something as solid and impenetrable as the cliffs behind them. “It’s just what I’ve observed,” she said. “If I wasn’t paying attention, would you have talked to anyone about how your leg was in pain? About how your mom is drunk more nights than not, or how your dad is never even home?”

“Oh fuck you,” Raven says, her suddenly raised hackles imbuing her words with venom, “you think you’re so smart for eavesdropping on your neighbour’s shouting matches.”

Luna looks a little worried now, her brow creasing. “I don’t mean to intrude,” she says, “just… you can talk to me. If you’d like. If you don’t have anyone else to talk to.”   
“I do,” Raven snaps, “I have for a while now.”

“That’s good,” she says, sounding earnest, “I just wanted to make sure you had someone--”

“He’s great,” Raven’s tone is clipped, short, “anyway. I’m kind of sick of the beach now. You done?”

Luna gives her a long look, but eventually nods. Raven ignores the slump of her shoulders.

When they’re packed up and walking back up to the road along the beach, Raven pulls her phone out and angles the screen away from Luna, hoping the girl doesn’t see her composing a new message to Jay.

 

*

**Raven** : yo

**Raven** : ur not gonna bail tonight right??

 

Clarke squints at her phone in the early morning gloom, throws her head back with a groan when she sees the message. Truthfully, she had forgotten that Miller’s party was tonight, but she shoots off a reply confirming her attendance. She puts the phone down and rolls over, huffs a sigh half into her pillow. There’s something about the notion of having to go out that night, to make conversation and feel like she’s constantly going to be talking  _ around  _ the gaping absence of Wells, plastering a smile on her face and acting the way people are supposed to act in the endless freedom of summer…the whole thing exhausts her.

Still, she forces herself up eventually, gets herself to Second Dawn just about on time. Bellamy glances up when she comes in, nods in acknowledgement.

“You’re on gold digging duty today,” he says, retrieving an overflowing box from behind the desk.

She raises an eyebrow. “Are we sure this is the same job I got hired for?”

He snorts. “It’s not as scandalous as it sounds. It means you go through our new donations and catalogue if there’s anything potentially interesting or valuable there. Rare books, first editions. Stuff people have tucked in the pages.”

She falters as she takes the stuff from him, but he doesn’t notice. “Tucked in the pages?”   
“Yeah,” his eyes light up, “sometimes it’s just old receipts and bookmarks and things. But occasionally you get some cool stuff -- postcards, photographs.”

Clarke wets her lips, hesitates before asking. “Letters?”

“Yeah, sometimes we get those too.”

“Huh.”

Bellamy looks animated, his eyes alight with that glint only books give them. “We’ve found some great stuff over the years. Not often but -- it’s there.”   
“You’ve been…  _ gold digging…  _ for a while?”

He rolls his eyes at her, but shrugs. “Yup. Pretty much the whole time I’ve been working at the shop.” 

Clarke angles herself carefully as she moves to put the box down somewhere. She doesn’t want him to see her expression. Not before she schools her features into something more neutral. “Find anything good?”

Bellamy shrugs, grinning wryly to himself. “We get some cool stuff, yeah. Nothing that special though.”

She snorts without meaning to. It’s short and mean, and she winces.

He throws her a sidelong glance. “You good?”

“Fine.”

Bellamy looks at her a second longer, but just shrugs and moves over so she can sit at her chair behind the till and start spreading the things out. 

She worries her lip for a second, watching his back as he starts rolling up the blinds on the storefront windows and unlocking the front door. Clarke knows he catches her little slip-ups, she knows that in spite of everything, he still notices the the chinks in her armour, and it makes her nervous. It’s not that she means to throw everything that happened back in his face, whether or not he deserves it. But as much as she doesn’t feel the way she did when she left him that stupid letter anymore, she can’t quite forget the memory of the pain. She’d moved past it over the years but being back here, back in the bookshop… it feels palpable, the recollection of it all, like all of it’s just a moment of springing back from the past into the now. 

Clarke shakes herself and turns her attention back to the books. There’s a tentative peace that she and Bellamy have created now, and there’s no need to shatter it for the sake of bygone hurt. There’s a very real, albeit very small part of her that whispers in a mean little voice to hold on to the anger, that there’s no reason she should just forget about it. But god knows there’s enough for her to hold onto as it is without throwing her childhood heartbreak into the mix. She’s over that now anyway. Mostly. 

“There’s that party tonight,” she says more for a change in subject than anything else.

“Yup,” Bellamy says, “you gonna show your face?” 

He doesn’t mean for it to sound so threatening, but the image of having to face a milieu of acquaintances and strangers and the effort it’s going to take to convince them all that everything is normal makes her queasy. She nods, hoping it looks casual.

“Did Raven give you the address?” he asks.

“Um,” Clarke pulls out her phone and scrolls through the old messages. “No actually. Could you--”

He’s right up near her all of a sudden, pulling the phone from her hands and typing the address on a new Notes page. She feels his callused fingers brush hers when he hands the device back. “Thanks,” Clarke says, stepping back and turning to face the pile of books.

“Sure thing.” 

She forces herself to focus back on the gold-digging. It’s hard; she can’t stop herself from imagining Bellamy finding the letter all those years ago and then… what? She doesn’t know -- forgetting about it and leaving it in a drawer to gather dust somewhere, reading it and crumpling it in horror or disgust, tearing it into pieces along with her heart? 

Clarke shakes herself, refusing to relive the wallowing that seemed to define the awful year she left. 

The sorting and logging of items takes her a while, but Bellamy’s right. There’s nothing that special.

*

**_September 2014_ **

 

**DRAFTS: From:** griffinclarke@gmail.com

**To:** bblake1@gmail.com

**Subject:** i miss you

Bellamy,

 

I don’t care okay? I don’t care about the kiss or the letter or anything else that happened. I’ve been so mad at you but I just don’t care anymore. This sucks. It sucks not talking to you and not seeing you and I hate it. I miss you so much it feel like I can’t breathe.

  
  
  


**Send:                                                          Delete: X**

 

**DRAFTS: From:** bblake1@gmail.com

**To:** griffinclarke@gmail.com

**Subject:** hi

Hey Princess,

 

How’ve you been? I know you probably won’t answer this but I wanted to know how you were doing. It’s been a while.

  
  


Did I do something?

 

**Send:                                                          Delete: X**

 

**_*_ **

It’s about the millionth time Bellamy’s seen this stretch of the beach but it’s a view that never gets old, especially not with glow of the setting the sun spilling across the ocean and staining the waves pink. He tears a piece of bread off the end of his hot dog and tosses it to a nearby gull.

“Do you mind?” Miller grumbles, “that only makes them come back for more.”

“I’m doing you a favour then,” he retorts, “making sure you get some company round here.”

His friend cocks an eyebrow. “What are all these people then,” he gestures at the party guests, chopped liver?” 

“The seagulls might still be better conversationalists,” Bellamy snarks, taking a swig of his beer.

“Ever the charmer, Blake,” Miller rolls his eyes and pushes up from the log they’re sat on.    
“I should probably go be hospitable,” he says, sounding like he’s being marched to the gallows.

Bellamy waves at him and takes the opening to lie with his back flat on the log, eyes closed. He’s sure someone will come up and talk to him soon enough; people usually do at these sorts of gatherings. If you pressed him on it, Bellamy would probably have to acquiesce that he’s relatively popular, a fact which in and of itself makes him feel like he’s getting away with something. It’s as though no one’s figured out he’s a massive asshole yet. Or at least, no one’s figured it out and stuck around afterwards. He listens to the rush of the waves as they ebb and flow up and down the sand. The sound is about the most constant thing in Arkadia, and it’s always comforted him. When he was younger, he used to come down and search for seashells or bits of driftwood, pretending he was shipwrecked. For about a month after he read  _ Treasure Island _ , he’d dragged Clarke to go looking for buried gold. She’d drawn them up a map complete with an X-marking-the-spot, and they’d followed it earnestly, completely unconcerned with the fact that it was a made-up map that in no way corresponded to their surroundings. They’d never found anything except for a few discarded coins and bits of seaglass, but it had been treasure enough at the time. Besides, by the time Bellamy finished  _ Robinson Crusoe _ , their focus had shifted quickly from treasure hunting to survivalism, with Clarke earnestly drawing blueprints in the sand for the sturdiest shelters they could make out of branches and twine. 

“Peaceful isn’t she?” a voice above him asks.

He cracks an eye open and sees Luna, the girl Raven’s been saddled with, perched on the end of the branch, looking out across the water.

“The ocean’s a she?”

Luna shrugs. “Only for the moment. Just like peacefulness, for that matter.”

He sees what Raven means about her being a  _ character _ . 

“Did you get a drink?” he asks, sitting up. “I can grab you one.”

“I’m set,” she says, waving her rum and coke at him, “but thanks.”

They clink their drinks together.

“I’m trying to think of something to ask you other than  _ so how are you liking Arkadia? _ ” he confesses, “since I’m assuming you get that a lot.”

She grins at that. “You’d be right. I’ll go -- so how are you liking this party?”   
He huffs in laughter. “It’s cool. They all seem to blend together after a while though, you know?”

Luna picks up a pebble and turns it over in her hands. “I haven’t really had the chance to find out,” she says, and it sounds like an admission. “Parties aren’t really my scene.”

“But Raven dragged you?” he guesses.

She hums noncommittally, not taking her eyes off the pebble.

“Or maybe,” Bellamy suggests, adopting a falsely casual tone, “you pretended you wanted to go because you worked out how much Raven did?”

Luna skips the stone across the surface of the water. “I don’t know what you mean,” she says, but he notes she’s winding a few loose curls around her fingers in a manner that suggests it’s a nervous habit. “Anyway, Raven  _ does _ seem to be having a good time.”

Bellamy tracks her gaze to where Raven’s standing, talking and laughing with some guy from their senior class. He knows the guy probably doesn’t have much of a shot with her; but then again no one has for a while, so he’s not sure the reassurance will do Luna much good.

“She’s never met a hot dog she didn’t like,” he tells Luna instead, nodding towards the grill, “if you were wondering.”

He grins as the girl heads off to the barbeque just a little too quickly to maintain her normal floaty gait, and then he decides it’s probably time to start being social. He folds easily into a conversation with Bree Mackenzie, and is idly considering asking her if she wants to go make out somewhere when he sees Raven approaching dragging Luna and someone else with her. 

“Your ex just got here by the way,” Raven says without preamble, barely sparing a glance for Bree. Bree, in all fairness, seems relatively unfazed by the interruption, which is more than can be said for him as he’s just realised the  _ someone else  _ Raven has in tow is Clarke.

“You showed up,” he says, and she inclines her head with a slight smile. 

“Oh hey,” Bree says, “were you in Miss Singh’s History class in like seventh grade?”

Clarke nods. “Yeah. It’s Bree right?”

“Omigod hi,” the girl says, “this is so crazy. I remember, you and your step-brother were on the table behind me. Is he back here too?”

“No,” Clarke pulls the sleeve of her shirt down over her hand, “he’s not.”

“Oh, okay, well.” Bree shrugs. “I’m gonna go dance! Catch you later,” she says to Bellamy.

The conversation flows in another direction, people joining their circle gradually, naturally. Bellamy tries to pretend it escapes his notice that Clarke always seems to be sat just a little on the outside, never quite seeming to know who to look at or when to talk. It sends a pang through him. Back before they left, when they’d just started graduating from the ice-cream-and-jelly brand of parties to more grown-up affairs like these, she’d seem to fit in seamlessly. She’d always been with him, for one thing, muttering something to him under her breath or fact checking his exaggerated stories when he addressed the group, or goading him and Wells into some meaningless debate. She’d never exactly been a social butterfly but she’d always been  _ comfortable _ , sure of her place in a way that seemed permanent. Now she looks… lonely. She looks lonely which is bullshit, because she doesn’t  _ get  _ to be lonely. You can’t be lonely if you choose to cut yourself off, that’s not how it works. 

“Jesus it’s hot,” some kid who’s sat across from him complains, “who’s up for a dunk?”

The suggestion is met by a chorus of enthusiastic  _ yeses _ and  _ sures _ , and people starts stripping off t-shirts and cover-ups and jogging towards the water in what looks like a more gangly teenage rendition of  _ Baywatch _ .

“You coming, Clarke?” Luna asks as she folds her sarong up and places it on a rock. Bellamy smirks when he catches sight of Raven staring studiously at anything except Luna and her tie-dye bikini.

“No.” She pulls her phone out and starts scrolling, only looking up when she realises her abrupt dismissal has cast an awkward silence on the group. 

Luna shifts her weight to her other foot uncomfortably, and Raven raises an eyebrow. “Um. Okay?”

Clarke smiles a tight smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m not really a beach person.”

“Bullshit.” It’s out before Bellamy can stop himself. Clarke looks stunned, to say nothing of the others, but he’s started so he might as well go on. “You once came down here every day for two weeks straight so you could  _ accurately  _ pretend to be a mermaid when we played  _ Peter Pan _ . I had to manhandle you out of the water just to go get lunch.”

She’s flushed now, with anger or embarrassment he can’t tell. He knows his outburst seems unfounded, but something about the situation ranckles him.

Clarke blinks. Blinks again, and he almost feels bad.

Then she says, “we were  _ kids _ Bellamy.”

It hurts. It fucking  _ hurts  _ a surprising amount, knowing she’s not just talking about the beach days but about everything, all that they had and all that they were before she left it behind to rot. 

“Whatever,” he says, peeling off his shirt and dumping it on the sand next to him. He turns to Luna and Raven. “Race you guys to the water?”

He ignores the uneasy feeling in his stomach that the exchange left him with and focuses on other things -- the cool of the salt water on the heat of his back, the happy shouts of his friends around him. He doesn’t let himself look over when Raven eventually drags Clarke closer to the water, doesn’t look at where she sits hunched over in the sand staring at some fixed spot in front of her. 

They play volleyball half-in and half-out of the water, a game that quickly devolves into tackling and wrestling. Bree jumps on his back and Miller nails him in the face with the ball, making him splutter and then laugh. Raven’s leg starts to bother her after a while and Luna goes to sit by her on a brine-slicked rock. The sun gets lower in the sky and he helps Miller build the bonfire. Everyone gravitates towards it, circling around the flames as they lick higher and higher towards the sky. Some idiot gets out a guitar and starts up what quickly devolves into a very loud, out-of-tune singalong rendition of “All Star.” He notices Clarke isn’t singing. She’s staring blankly into the fire, her hands curled into her sides like she’s cold, though it’s still warm for the evening.

People start to make their way back to the water, lazier this time, wading in to knee-depth. A few couples pair off to make out against the larger boulders. Riley and Niall start a splash flight, making the people near them laugh as they trash talk each other.

“You’re dead, Adams,” Niall says, cupping some water in his hands and hurling it at Riley’s face.

“Fuck you, dude!” Riley laughs and splashes him back, except he splashes too hard and gets Clarke in the face with some of the spray.

Bellamy is about to laugh, because honestly she looks hilarious, shellshocked and hair dripping, when suddenly she rounds on Riley. 

“What the  _ fuck  _ is your problem?” she snaps.

Riley freezes. “Sorry!”

“You fucking drenched me!” she’s screaming now, and Bellamy could swear she’s actually trembling with anger. “Do you know how cold that water is? People get pneumonia from that shit! They  _ die  _ but you assholes just don’t give a fuck, you’re too busy dicking around to care about what’s happening to anyone else!” 

Riley is gaping, and people have fallen silent.

“You wanna take it down a notch?” Bellamy interjects, “he said he was sorry. And it’s not that bad, Princess, you’ll dry off in a minute. Calm down.”

“No, fuck you,” she snaps, rounding on him with a vitriol that, despite everything, he hadn’t been expecting, “this has nothing to do with you.”

“You made it something do with  _ all of us _ when you went raging asshole on our friend  _ in front _ of all of us!”

“Stay out of it!” she shouts back at him, “just leave me alone! You managed it perfectly fine for five years, for god’s sake don’t change your mind now!”

“What the fuck Princess?” Bellamy finds he’s enraged now, like some dam he didn’t know was inside him has burst. “What do you think you’re proving by throwing the past in my face? You’re the one that decided you were too good for this hick town and just fucked off without a backwards glance, and now you’re throwing a temper tantrum because some mere mortal dared to fuck up your hair!”

Speaking of mere mortals, Riley has slipped off somewhere. Most people seem to be pretending to having their own conversations whilst blatantly obviously watching the blow-out; Raven looks stunned into silence for once.

“I’m  _ sorry _ ,” he continues, “that you think this whole thing is beneath you and whatever fancy-ass parties you got used to in Boston. But that doesn’t give you the right to treat people like shit just because they’re not some governor’s kids or whatever.”

“That is  _ not  _ what I’m--”

“Tell me, is it just you that has this much of a stick up your ass now? Or did Wells get-- what the  _ fuck _ ?!” he splutters, cut off when Clarke flings her drink in his face. He stares at her as the lemonade runs down his neck in rivulets.

“Fuck you,” she spits, “ _ fuck you _ .” Her hands are trembling so hard Bellamy can see them “I’m done.” She storms off up towards the house and disappears from view, never once pausing to look behind her.

*

Clarke doesn’t realise she’s crying until she’s already started driving. The tears start to well so much she can’t blink them away quickly enough to see, so she pulls over, unbuckles her seat belt, and gives in to the desire to crumple into a ball by furling to the floor between the seat and the steering wheel.

She should have called it quits the moment she realised Miller’s house was a  _ beach  _ house, the moment she could hear the crashing of the waves. But she hadn’t, she’d convinced herself that she owed it to Raven, even to the fragile peace she and Bellamy had developed in the bookstore, to go down and join the party. 

The sobs she’s heaving are huge wracking ones that shake her whole frame; she tries to control them but it isn’t working. Her head is buzzing with too much panic to focus on one thing, she feels like she’s drowning in it…  _ drowning _ … 

She knows she screwed up. Even while she was snapping at Riley, some calmer, saner part of her brain had hissed that she was being a bitch. But she couldn’t help it; from start to finish the whole thing seemed designed to pull her strings tighter and tighter and tighter until there was nothing for them to do but snap.

And then Bellamy. Fucking Bellamy. That had been it really, hadn’t it, the point where she should have known that the evening would culminate in disaster? He’d stared her down and called her out unflinchingly on her excuse about not being a beach person, and she’d hated him for it, hated him for acting like he had some sort of  _ right _ to know what the truth of her was. She’d hated him for that, for the assumption that anything that had happened to change her from the little girl scabbing her knees on the edges of rock pools with her best friend into  _ this  _ was all a lie. If she’d made it all up it wouldn’t hurt this badly. 

Clarke presses a hand to her chest like that can calm the ragged tattoo of her heartbeat. It doesn’t work. Her head starts pounding so loudly she can’t hear anything, it keeps pounding, but, no, it’s not her head -- someone is knocking on the car window. She considers just staying where she is, hunched under the steering wheel hoping they can’t see her, but then Bellamy says “open up Clarke, I know you’re down there” and well, she’s long given up on trying to evade the inevitable so she reaches up and opens the door. 

It swings open and there he is. Judging by the sweat matting his curls he must have sprinted all the way after her. 

“You always try to shrink when you’re upset,” he says, offering her a hand. Clarke stares at it; it’s steady and sure and seems to say  _ I’ll always be here, ready to pull you up _ . Liar. But he either doesn’t notice her skepticism or doesn’t care, and eventually there seems to be nothing else to do but let him help her. She remembers a time when the sensation would have been familiar, of his hand warm and firm as it grasped hers. She remembers it, dimly, distantly. Like it’s someone else’s memories. In some ways, she supposes, it is. 

“You try to disappear into the smallest space available,” Bellamy’s still talking as though nothing’s changed, which is a thousand degrees of bullshit. “Like you hope no one can see you.”

She doesn’t say anything to that, just scrubs her sleeve down over her face and tries ineffectually to look less like she’s been crying.

They stand there in silence for a moment, neither one really sure what to say. It’s the kind of moment that probably demands apologies, but Clarke doesn’t think either one of them is actually that sorry. 

“Would you mind driving for a while?” she says after the silence drags on.

He takes the keys wordlessly and they slide into their respective sides of the car.

“If I drive to the bookstore are you good to take over from there?” he asks. 

Clarke nods.

The silence they maintain is in some weird liminal space that’s neither companionable nor awkward. It’s a silence that settles when there’s too much to say for anything to really be said properly. 

Idly, Clarke thinks of the kinds of fights they got in before. The fights about Clarke dog-earing one of Bellamy’s books or Bellamy spilling something on Clarke’s sketches if she was working on the floor. When they were really little, their worst arguments would take the shape of them sitting back-to-back on the ground, arms folded and scowling in opposite decisions, refusing to speak to one another until they either forgot what they were squabbling about or got bored. 

She smiles wanly to herself. Neither one of them is in the business of forgetting their anger anymore, it would seem.

Bellamy is good with silences, she notes as she watches him from the corner of her eye. There’s no signs of discomfort on him. He just keeps his eyes on the road, not fidgeting or trying to turn the radio on. He doesn’t even look tensed. It’s a little unfair, she can’t help but think, the easiness with which he handles himself. Like he’s done nothing to feel uncomfortable about.

_ He doesn’t know _ , the voice in her head whisper,  _ he doesn’t know why you freaked _ . Not that it matters. But still. He doesn’t know.

They stop at a red light, and suddenly he reaches over and tugs gently at the end of her hair. “Told you you’d dry off quickly,” he says.

She feels her throat bob as his finger brushes just briefly against the curve of her neck as he takes his hand back.

“So did you,” she notes with a raised eyebrow.

He snorts. “Lemonade is sticky, I hope you realise.”

Clarke shrugs. “Should’ve ducked.”

The light turns green, and the car moves again, keeps going until he pulls up outside the bookstore. 

“I figured it would be easier,” he says, undoing his seatbelt.

“What?”   
“Trying to be friends again.” He doesn’t sound angry, or particularly emotive at all for that matter. He offers her a tiny, corner-of-the-mouth smile.

Clarke climbs out of her own side of the car and reaches across to take the keys from him. 

_ He doesn’t know.  _

_ You don’t owe him an explanation. _

_ But he doesn’t know. _

“Okay,” he says, retrieving his own set of keys from his pocket and finding the right one for the shop, “have a good night.”

“Wells is dead.”

Bellamy freezes by the door.

“We were in Cape Cod a few months back. He drowned.”

She doesn’t know if Bellamy moves after that. She’s already back in her car and pulling away.

*

Raven can’t remember the exact sequence of events that led her to this moment but she doesn’t exactly care right now. Her mouth is latched onto Luna’s neck and Luna’s hand is groping her boob over her shirt and she’s grinding down on Luna’s thigh and it feels  _ so good  _ and she doesn’t remember how they got like this or why they shouldn’t be doing this and she doesn’t care.

She pulls back for a second, shuddering a little at the whine Luna lets out at the loss of contact. Raven peels off her shirt, revelling in the slightly dazed expression that comes over the other girl’s face.

“Someone could see,” Luna murmurs. 

“Lucky them,” Raven mutters. Luna’s right, it’s only really a cluster of large rocks obscuring them from view of the beach, but again, it’s hard to care when the damp of Luna’s bikini is pressed up against her bare skin. 

“Um,” Luna gives a little gasp when Raven nips at the underside of her jaw, and Raven instantly wants to hear the sound again. 

Raven drags Luna’s mouth down to hers, swallowing Luna’s moans as her hands travel up to the tie-dyed strings of her bikini top. Raven fumbles with the ties, trying to get them loose. She can’t, and it makes her giggle. “Why’s it so  _ hard _ ,” she complains, grabbing at them again. She tugs and they still don’t come loose; she giggles again. 

Luna goes still. “You’re drunk.”

“ _ Shh! _ ” Raven claps her hand over Luna’s mouth, “don’t tell anyone!”

Luna pries her hand gently off, and sets her hands on Raven’s shoulders pushing carefully away. “You’re drunk, Raven. You wouldn’t be doing…well, you wouldn’t be doing  _ this _ if you weren’t.”

Raven pouts, but Luna’s already picking up her sarong and retying it like a tunic. “Come on,” she picks up Raven’s shirt and hands it back to her, sighing when Raven makes no move to take it. “We should go.”

Raven finally tugs the shirt back on sulkily, but the haze seems to fade as she does, the reckless heat of moments earlier blowing away with the sea breeze. 

“Sorry,” she mutters, retrieving her hair tie and redoing her ponytail.

Luna coughs. “Don’t worry about it. If you want to try again when you’re sober…”

And oh fuck, she really is a dick. Raven looks at her hands. They seem steadier now than they were minutes earlier, fumbling to undress Luna. “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been terrible to you. But…”

“There’s someone else?”

Raven blinks at her in surprise. 

Luna smiles sadly. “I didn’t think you’d spend that much time staring at your phone just because you were a tech junkie.”

Raven feels sheepish. “It’s not like… ugh, this is going to sound really stupid so please don’t tell anyone or I’ll have to kill you. I have this…  _ friend _ I guess? We’ve been talking for years, but I don’t actually know him. Or, well, I  _ know  _ him but not like in person…” 

Bit by bit, Raven manages to cobble together the story of Jay-who’s-name-isn’t-Jay and how she’s pretty sure she’s in love with him at this point as dumb as it sounds. 

“So yeah,” she finishes, “he’s gone AWOL for a while. And I know there’s every chance it turns out he was just a dick who had no intention of telling me who he was, or that I was victim to the world’s most long-con catfish but…”

“But you haven’t given up yet so you’re still holding out hope?”

“I know it sounds stupid,” Raven shrugs.

“It doesn’t,” Luna says, “thank you for telling me.”

“And hey if it doesn’t work out--”  

“I’d rather not be your backup, thanks,” Luna says.

Raven had been going for levity, so the sharpness of Luna’s response takes her by surprise. 

A flicker of what looks like hurt crosses the other girl’s face but it passes.

“I--I’m sorry,” Raven says. “I didn’t--”

“It’s fine,” Luna cuts her off in a flat voice, “I shouldn’t have snapped.”

They make the walk back to their houses in silence. Luna pauses before walking up to her own front door.

“Thank you,” she says, “for taking so much time out of your summer to show me round.” The finality that laces her tone makes Raven’s stomach sink. “I know you didn’t want to but I really appreciate it. But I’ll let you get back to your own life now.”

There’s nothing hostile or cutting in Luna’s words, but as Raven walks away she can’t shake off the feeling that she may as well have been slapped.

*

Bellamy hasn’t moved from the window seat since he got back inside the shop. He’d sat down to watch Clarke’s car pull away, and it hadn’t occurred to him to get up again. 

_ Wells is dead _ .

It’s probably the worst thing he’s ever heard. Nothing about it makes sense. Wells isn’t  _ supposed  _ to be dead. It doesn’t make sense.

Even the grief that had weighted him since his mother’s death makes sense. Parents do die. Perhaps not as soon as Aurora Blake did, but they die before their children. It’s natural. 

Nothing about this is natural. 

He remembers Wells curling up on the seat he’s sat in now, content to while away hours poring over an encyclopedia or a paperback mystery whenever he and Clarke were off in their old world. Wells, who would trail willingly behind Clarke wherever she was going, the only other person besides Bellamy ever capable of reining her in. Wells, who despite being a head shorter and far scrawnier than Bellamy had marched up to him in fourth grade and told him to stop hogging the swingset with his friends so that other kids could have a turn.

Fuck, Wells was meant to grow up and be President or head of the UN or something, he was the kind of kid that was  _ going places _ . He wasn’t meant to be dead. 

Drowned.

For some horrible, twisted reason Bellamy wants to laugh. Nobody dies from  _ drowning _ , not in real life. People die because they get sick or get in car accidents. They don’t  _ drown _ . He thinks of the beach just hours earlier, where they were all splashing and swimming and playing around. 

_ And the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. _

The line hadn’t meant much to him a few years ago, when he’d read about Captain Ahab falling to a watery grave, but it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up now. How many times has he been down to the beach in the past few months, walking along the water and never once realising it’s a graveyard?

He remembers it suddenly, the book he’d pried away from Clarke the day she’d had the panic attack in the shop.  _ The Beauty of Earth’s Oceans _ . Clarke…

Bellamy closes his eyes. The look on her face when Riley had splashed her, her standoffishness at the party… it hadn’t been disdain.

It was fear.

And he’d yelled at her for it. 

He gets up off the seat, feeling an awful hollowness start to unfurl in his stomach. It was probably for the best that she’d left after telling him about Wells because truthfully, he has no idea what he’d have said to her. What could he say? He tries to imagine what he’d want to hear if it was Octavia instead of Wells, but he can’t even comprehend what that would be like, it’s just so unfathomable. His imagination has guided him through wars fought and lost and tragic romances and apocalypses and courtly betrayals and the wrath of gods. But it can’t grasp this. 

His phone buzzes and he almost ignores it, but it’s a message from Clarke.

**Clarke:** thx for the ride

**Clarke:** plz don’t tell anyone what i told you

**Clarke:** gnite x

He’s unquestioningly certain then that he’s the only person who knows. It feels strange, like he’s crossed some kind of invisible wall, living in a slightly different reality to everyone else. For everyone else, Wells is fine. Where he and Clarke are, Wells is dead. 

Bellamy’s moving through the shelves and pulling a book out almost without realising it, but it seems like his next move is made for him. He opens it to the blank endpapers at the front of the book, fishes a pen from his pocket, and starts writing. He doesn’t know how long it takes him to finish the note, but he doesn’t stop until it’s done. 

*

Clarke doesn’t think about skipping work the next day. For one thing, it would mean having to tell Callie why, which in turn would mean having to deal with Callie’s concern and general good intentions. 

For another, it’s not like there’s much point. Bellamy knows now, and if she doesn’t face whatever that means now, she’ll just have to face it later. She knows he won’t have told anyone -- she asked him not to, and even if he didn’t reply, she knows he’ll respect that. 

So she pulls up to Second Dawn the same as always and lets herself in. He looks up and offers her a small smile and a “hey” when she walks in, but doesn’t bring up last night, which relaxes her. 

They don’t talk much during the day, just communicating about work and busy with their own tasks, and Clarke thinks that’s going to be it, but then when it’s closing time, he says “wait here” and disappears into the back room to retrieve something. 

She waits; she’s too confused to do anything else.

When he comes back, he hands her a book.

“I wrote a letter in it,” he says without preamble, “I didn’t give it to you this morning because I really didn’t want to just hang around watching you read it, and I figured you didn’t want me hanging around while you figured out how to respond.”

“Probably a good call,” she acquiesces. She looks down at the cover.  _ A Monster Calls  _ by Patrick Ness. 

“Reading the actual book or not is up to you,” he says, “though it’s pretty good. But you should read the letter. If you want to.”

She doesn’t open it until she’s at home, after dinner when she’s in her pyjamas and ready for bed. She’s tried not to speculate about what he could have written -- she doubts it’s anything shocking or he’d have been less composed handing it over. 

But still.

_ Princess _ , it begins, and it surprises her how familiar it all is, the way she can hear the cadence of his voice on the nickname even when it’s flat on paper, the hard press of his blue biro that leaves the words slightly indented on the thin page, the neat looping flow of his cursive that’s just a little more curly and feminine than one would expect from him.

 

_ Princess, _

_ I don’t know what it says about humans as a species that these kind of conversations are always easier when they’re not face-to-face. And in this instance, I don’t think it’s an “us” problem either. I keep turning over all the things I could say and should say and then I can’t decide if they sound right. At least this way if I wind up sounding like a callous idiot I don’t have to watch you realise it, and you don’t have to put up with my face while you do. _

_ The thing is, I can only think of things I’m sure you  _ won’t  _ want to hear. The litany of “I’m sorry’s” and “that’s awful’s” that these situations usually invite has never actually been helpful or welcome, as far as I’m aware, and yet it’s the only thing people ever seem to fall back on when the time comes. I remember standing at my mother’s funeral and swearing to myself than it was my turn to offer condolences, I wouldn’t be the idiot wasting the mourner’s time with empty words and just making everything worse. I would be different, I would say exactly what I would have wanted to hear in the circumstances. _

_ And therein lies the problem. I don’t know what I’d have wanted to hear, I don’t know what you want to hear. Do we want to hear anything at all?  _

_ I think what’s worse is this conviction I have that once, I would have known what to say. Once, maybe I wouldn’t have needed to say anything. Maybe just my being there would have been enough. And I know it’s not like that anymore. I meant what I said, when I wanted us to try be friends again. Not because it would be awkward otherwise, but because it was better when we were. I’m not wrong am I? I’m sure we’ve both been fine ever since, but believe me when I say ours was the best friendship I ever had. I think what’s really remarkable is that only after it ended did I realise it wasn’t something everyone had. I don’t think anyone really understood the way I missed you because no one knew what it was I was missing. No one had had anything that great. _

_ And I know it’s been bad since you got back. Not just on the beach but even before. We were being polite and careful and a hundred other things that we’re not supposed to be. Since when has our friendship ever hinged upon “friendliness?” Look you’ll never hear me willingly quote T-Swizzle again after this, but I think she was onto something when she sang “band-aids don’t fix bullet holes; we say sorry just for show.” (I reiterate -- I am never going to do that again). What I’m getting at is this -- I was hurt. I knew on some intellectual level it made more sense to fix whatever we broke but I don’t think it was something I could just set my mind to and decide to make better. _

_ (I know I’m rambling here; bear with me) _

_ I was so angry at you for leaving, but I don’t want to feel that way anymore. More than anything, thinking about Wells made me realise that even if you left, you came back. For whatever reason you came back. However much it felt like I’d lost you, I hadn’t really. Not in a way that can’t be fixed. And I want to fix it. I think I realise now that it’s not just a matter of turning a switch and deciding to be friends again. We’ll have to try. We’ll have to learn each other again and it’ll probably be exhausting and we might still end up killing each other.  _

_ But I’m up for it if you are.  _

_ If this isn’t what you want to hear right now, or at all, then that’s okay too. I get if you don’t want this on your head on top of everything else. But if you do, you know where to find me. _

_ Looking to you, Princess. _

__      -     B _ _

 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All I'm saying is there is a scientifically proven correlation in the number of comments and the speed of updates :))))


	3. iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the continued comments and kudos!! I can't overstate enough how motivating and uplifting they are, and I've been genuinely overwhelmed by the support. This chapter is shorter than the others but hopefully the content makes up for it...

Bellamy’s not surprised when he gets her text, not completely anyway. He hadn’t been able to get to sleep so he’s quick getting downstairs and unlocking the door.

Clarke is standing outside. “Hi.”

He steps aside and lets her in, closing the door softly behind her.

“You good?” he asks.

“Yes.” She worried her lip. “No. No, fuck, no I’m really not.” She collapses onto the window seat. “We were on a weekend break,” she says, “and he wanted to go in because the water looked nice that day. And I didn’t come because I was texting Lexa and my mom and Thelonious were walking and then Thelonious came back and we realised we couldn’t see him and he was gone,” she’s crying now, Bellamy can see her shoulder shake with sobs, “and god I know I should have felt heartbroken or whatever and most of the time I don’t feel _anything_ and I couldn’t stand anyone who tried to make me and I pushed everyone away and I broke up with Lexa and I said _awful_ things to my mom and I didn’t even care, not about any of it. I didn’t even turn up to my own graduation,” she says, and her sobs have turned convulsive now.

Whatever residual forces had held him back before are well and truly melted away now; Bellamy doesn’t hesitate to gather her into his arms and let her cry into his chest. “Not that it would have mattered because I never bothered applying to college so I’m not going anywhere. Sometimes I don’t even remember what it was like before this, before I just spent all my time being so fucking _depressed_ . I think I’m just going to feel like this forever and I can’t breathe when I think that, I hate thinking of spending another _day_ like this and w-w-when I think of spending m-months and years like this I-I-I--”

“ _Shh_ ,” Bellamy rocks her gently back and forth as the sobs supercede her ability to speak, “shh shh shh, I got you.” He strokes her hair carefully, just petting at her gently until she’s able to breathe normally again.

“S-sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” he tells her, “God, Clarke, this whole thing is so fucked up -- I’d be more upset if you weren’t reacting like this.”

“I ruined your shirt.”

“It wasn’t that nice to begin with.”

“I don’t know why I’m still so fucked up,” she mutters, wiping her eyes on her shirtsleeves and breaking his heart a little, “it was ten months ago.”  
“You’re _not_ fucked up,” he tells her. “And ten months is nothing next to that kind of loss. Besides, there’s no expiration date on grief, okay? Fuck anyone who tells you otherwise.”

Clarke nods.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks quietly. “When it happened? I’d have come. For the funeral, I’d have been there.”  
“I know,” she says, and the surety in her voice surprises him. “I know you would. Just… it felt like telling people made it more real.”   
He nods, and she releases a shuddering breath before pulling back from him carefully.

“Thank you,” she says in a low voice, “for your letter. It meant a lot. And… I’d like to -- to try.”  
“Yeah?”

She smiles a little and nods. “Yeah.”

They both hesitate for a moment, lingering in a silence that’s left them both a little raw.

“Do you wanna stay here tonight?” he offers. “It’s late to drive back; we can find you something to wear in the morning.”

Clarke considers for a moment but then nods. “If it’s not too much trouble then yeah, that’d be good.”

She gets up to follow him upstairs, and he pauses. “What are you doing?”

“Um. Going to the guest bedroom?”

He smiles, an idea taking shape in his head. “Oh no you’re not.”

*

Blanket fort architecture is much like riding a bike, it turns out. After a surprised huff of laughter when Bellamy had emerged with an armful of cushions and sheets along with a string of fairy lights, Clarke had found herself springing automatically into action, arranging pillows and draping the sheets to the exact specifications that she and Bellamy had long ago determined were optimal for a sturdy fort. Bellamy switches the fairy lights on and grins at her, his face illuminated in the softly pulsing glow. He holds the flap at the front of the fort open for her and crawls in after her.

When they were younger, they used to disappear in here with piles of books and snacks and while away hours content to just keep each other company. Now though, it’s clear that this is less just a spot for them to hang out -- it’s shrouded in a kind of dreaminess, a careful isolation that wraps around them like a cloak and shields them in together, somewhere nothing on the outside can touch them.

“Sorry I don’t have any popcorn,” Bellamy says, “I was working on short notice.”

“I’ll let it go this once.”

They lower themselves so they’re lying down. They used to be able to do that with space for all their things spread around them, but they both have to curl up to fit now. They’re so close; Clarke could count each of his freckles.

“I really missed you,” she tells him. It feels like an admission.

Bellamy draws in a breath. “I missed you too,” he says, “so much.”

They don’t say anything else before falling asleep. It doesn’t matter. They have time now.

It figures that Bellamy is awake before she is -- she used to wonder if he didn’t just wake up with the sunrise like some kind of rooster.

“Hey,” he whispers, “I hate to disrupt your beauty sleep, but we need to get ready before opening.”

She rubs her eyes, and it’s only then she notices that hers and Bellamy’s pinkies are linked. They must have fallen asleep like that. He sees her looking down and pulls his hand back quickly.

Clarke rolls her neck. She’s a little stiff from a night on the floor but it’s the most peacefully she’s slept in weeks.

“Here,” Bellamy tosses her a pile of clothes. “The t-shirt’s mine, the leggings are O’s. You’re taller than she is but hopefully they’ll stretch.” Clarke thanks him and slips into the bathroom to change, thankful she has her bra on from last night. When she comes back out Bellamy’s folding up the sheets. She piles up the cushions and follows him upstairs to deposit the things in a linen closet.

“O, you up?” he calls down the hall.

No answer.

“You’re gonna be late for school!” he yells.

“I’m _up_!” she shouts “God!”

“There’s a smoothie for you in the fridge,” Bellamy says.

“I’m not hungry!” she calls back.

An image of Bellamy padding round the kitchen late at night, blending a smoothie and putting it in the fridge so it’s ready for his sister in the morning rises in her mind. It makes her throat close for some reason.

Bellamy avoids her gaze as they turn and head back down the stairs.

She watches his retreating figure for a moment. “Hey,” Clarke says, “have you thought about setting up a display? In the window?”

He turns to look at her consideringly. “Don’t we already have one?”

“What you have is a couple of popular books propped up on stands in the storefront window.”

“Is that not a display?”

She tuts. “Look the point of a display is to draw people in, right? Showing off the five least outdated books in your catalogue isn’t going to cut it.”

He raises an eyebrow at the challenge in her voice. “Alright, what do you suggest?”

Clarke gestures broadly at the shop around them. “Look at all the stock you have around you. They’re not just books, they’re building blocks. Colour-coordinated displays, book sculptures… the possibilities are endless.”

Bellamy’s starting to look steadily more interested. “You have any ideas?”

“I’d start with a simple rainbow display,” she says, “it’s fairly simple to plan out and it’ll be super eye-catching. Like this.” She pulls up instagram and finds the hashtag “book rainbow.” Bellamy leans over her shoulder to peer at her phone.

“Huh,” he says as she scrolls through some of the pictures, “that is pretty cool.”

“You can make sure I’m not taking any of the stock that we desperately need on shelves,” she continues.

“Can you draw up a plan for how we’d make it?” Bellamy says, sounding genuinely enthused now. “We can start setting it up after closing today -- that is, if you want to stay a little later.”

Clarke nods, firing off a message to Callie.

It’s another slow day in the shop, though Clarke’s starting to have the niggling awareness that most days in the shop are slow, but it gives them time to talk. Mostly, they ask each other questions, trying in earnest to fill in the blanks left over the past four years.

“Who’d you take to prom?”

“Gina. You?”

“My ex, Lexa.”

“Favourite food you discovered in Boston?”

“I got really into lobster.”

“That’s one of the bougiest things you’ve ever said.”

“You asked. Worst injury you’ve had over the past four years?”

“I fell out of a tree and broke my wrist trying to get Octavia down from a treehouse when she threatened to live there.”

Clarke hisses in sympathy. “Ouch.”

He flexes his wrist as though remembering the ache, grimacing. “Yeah. What about you?”

“I got a black eye. Because someone punched me.”

“What?”

“To be fair, I punched her first.”

“ _What_ ?” Bellamy splutters. “Clarke Griffin, did you have a _fistfight_ ?”   
She grins sheepishly. “Maybe a little.”

Bellamy clutches his hand dramatically to his chest. “The Princess is full of surprises.”

“Shut up,” she grumbles, feeling herself flush.

“No way,” he grins, “I want details. Was it an uppercut or right hook?”

*

Raven’s parents decide to have Luna’s family over for dinner that night, and it’s about as awkward as one would expect. Luna is perfectly friendly and conversational, and somehow that makes it worse. Raven tries to catch her eye a few times, to pull her aside and apologise, but Luna seems to slip through her fingers like water each time, happy to make pleasant conversation with Raven as long as she’s addressing the whole room.

“She seems to have settled in well,” her father remarks as they clear up the dishes later that night, “it was nice of you to help show her round.”

Raven shrugs, excusing herself to bed. Through her window, she can see the Luna’s bedroom light flick off.

Shaking her head as if that can physically shirk off the uncomfortable twinge of guilt, she pulls up Jay’s old messages. Honestly, it hadn’t bothered her for a long time, not knowing who he was. He’d never felt like a stranger -- he knew her better than almost anyone. She stares at the little time marker under his last message. Months ago.

She feels a flicker of anger as she puts the phone down. He has the nerve to make these proclamations about announcing his identity and then just goes radio silent without explanation? If this was happening to anyone else, Raven would tell them to forget the guy and move on.

 _You’re kind of like the universe_.

She gets up and draws the curtains shut, blocking off the view from outside.

It’s _not_ happening to anyone else.

She picks up the book on her bedside, an old paperback that someone or other probably gave her from Second Dawn at some point, and starts to read.

Then she sits bolt upright as a thought occurs to her.

If Jay won’t come to her, she’ll find him.

 _After all_ she thinks, slipping the book carefully into her bag, _now I know how to_.

*

“Mind if I join you?”

Bellamy glances up from his battered copy of _The Song of Achilles_ and sees Gina hesitating by his table, smiling a little.

He glances round the coffee shop quickly -- it’s not busy by any means.

“I have someone joining me soon,” he says, “but go ahead.”

She thanks him and slides the chair out to sit down. Bellamy finds himself hovering with his finger marking his page, wondering whether she’s going to talk or not.

“I’m sorry if this is awkward,” she says.

“Not at all,” he slips a napkin into the pages as a bookmark and sets it down. “What’s up?”

Gina tugs on the end of one her curls, a nervous tic Bellamy remembers well -- he used to tease her about it and make her blush.

“I don’t know if you know this but I’ve been seeing someone recently.”

He takes a sip of his coffee. “I didn’t know that.”

She drums her fingers on the table lightly. “You know Reuben Norton?”  
“Sure.”

“Him.”

Bellamy waits.

“Was I a good girlfriend?” she blurts out after a moment. “You know, apart from the… breaking up… God, I’m so sorry, this is super uncomfortable.”

“Uh, it’s fine.”  
“I just mean… we were good, weren’t we?”

“Yeah. Yes, we were good.”

Gina nods. “I loved you,” she says, “I don’t want you to think I didn’t. You’ll always be my first love.”

“I loved you too,” he tells her, “nothing can take that away from us. But Gina, and don’t take this the wrong way--”

“Why am I talking about all this with you?”

He laughs. “Pretty much.”

Gina chuckles, shaking her head. “I’ve just been thinking. It was always so easy with us, wasn’t it?”

“And it isn’t with Reuben?” he hazards a guess.

She glances at him for a moment, probably trying to gauge if he’s jealous or something. “No,” she sighs, slumping a little. “We fight. Not like, an unhealthy amount, but we fight. And some of the things he does just drive me _insane_ in a way you never did. And…” she tails off, looking embarrassed. “And hearing myself out loud I’m realising I really shouldn’t be coming to my ex with all of this.”

He snorts. “Probably not.” He pauses for a moment, watching her. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “you deserve to be happy and if you’re fighting because Reuben’s an asshole then I’d leave it. But if you’re fighting because you have something to fight for…”

Gina nods slowly, getting up. “Thanks, Bellamy. I’ll leave you to it now.” She bends and pecks him on the cheek. “Oh,” she laughs when she straightens back up, “just in time.”

He glances behind her and sees Clarke hovering a few feet behind Gina’s chair, looking uncertain.

“Hey,” he says getting up, “you made it!”

Clarke smiles. “Yeah, sorry I ran kind of late, I was helping Callie out moving some furniture… Are you, um--” her eyes flit between him and Gina.

“Gina was just leaving,” he assures her hurriedly, wincing when he realises how rude that sounds. “That is to say, I think she said…”

“I’ve got to go,” Gina says breezily, “bye guys!”

Clarke hesitates a moment longer. “I didn’t interrupt anything did I?”

“No,” he says, “she just stopped to say hi while I was waiting for you.”

She smiles at him, taking a sip of his coffee when he offers it to her. A few strands of flyaways bounce in front of the blue of her eyes; he blinks away a momentary urge to brush the stray hairs away from her face. “What are you reading?” she asks.

Bellamy waves the book at her to show her the cover. “It’s a retelling of _The_ _Iliad_ \--”

“You know it’s amazing how much you’ve _grown_ and _changed_ over the years--”

“Shut up. It’s a retelling of _The Iliad_ from the perspective of Patroclus.”

“Give me a minute,” Clarke holds up a finger, “that’s… Achilles’ _special friend_ right?” Her face is screwed with concentration, and honestly Bellamy thinks it’s kind of adorable.

“The one and only. Except this book isn’t ambiguous about it -- it’s a love story. An epic, doomed, tragic love story.”

“ _Aw_ ,” Clarke pretends to fan herself, “well be still my heart.”

Bellamy huffs indignantly. “What can I say? I’m a romantic.”

“Yeah,” she traces absent-minded designs on the tabletop, that distant expression coming over eyes that makes Bellamy wonder where she’s gone, if he can follow her there, “I know.”

*

**_June 2014_ **

 

“Wells! _Wells!_ Have you seen my other shoe?”

“You know when I say ‘Princess’ I don’t literally mean Cinderella right?”

Clarke bangs her head as she tries to sit up too quickly.

“Careful,” Bellamy hangs over the side, grinning at her upside down, “you know you lose like a thousand brain cells every time you bang this,” he knocks on her forehead.

She swats at him as she slides out from under the bed more gently. “Good thing you weren’t the one banging your head then, I don’t think you could afford it.”

“Wow, you’re so _funny_. So” he scoots back on the bed, moving so she can flop down next to him, “your shoe, huh?”

“I need it for tomorrow night,” she whines, “and I can only find one.”

Bellamy slides down and adjusts himself so that he’s position with his head pillowed in Clarke’s lap. She swallows. It’s only when she glances down that she realises she’s started toying with the curls of his hair; she pulls her hand away like it’s burning.

“Did it get into one of the boxes by accident?”

“I don’t think so, I kept all the stuff I’d need for the party out specially.”

“Huh.”

She can see his lashes now his eyes are closed; they’re long, longer than she thinks a boy’s have any right to be. _I wonder how they don’t get tangled up._

“Can’t you just wear another pair?” he asks.

“Wow are we sure you’re not actually the one that hit your head?”

Bellamy cracks one eye open. “Aw, c’mon Princess, you know you’d be the belle of the ball even if you turned up in Chucks.” He grins at her.

He makes dumb comments like that all the time, lighthearted and meaningless. But lately, she feels like she’s getting away with something.

Below her, Bellamy sighs.   
“What?”

“Just… this sucks. I can’t believe you’re gone day after tomorrow.”

“Jesus, Bell, it’s not like I’m dying,” she jokes, but it comes out shaky.

He sits up and tugs her into his side. It’s really inconvenient, the way feeling his warmth pressed up against her makes his heart flip in her chest, but he’s right -- they’ve got a day left to do this, so she lets herself put her head on his shoulder and tries to not to wonder whether he can hear her pulse racing or not. It’s about the most inconvenient thing that’s ever happened, this burgeoning inability to be around her best friend without feeling like she’s balancing on a precipice, seconds away from tumbling into… something.

“You better give me a Skype tour of Boston,” he says. “I’m gonna need to know the lay of the land so I know what I’m doing when I make it over and come visit.”

“So many Skype tours,” she promises, “but not _everything_ . I’m not showing you the _really_ good stuff until you get your ass over there -- that way you’ll have incentive to come.”

“You are my incentive you dork,” he bops her on the nose.

She can feel the flush spreading across her face, and it’s probably not helpful that the quickest way she can think of hiding it is to bury her face in Bellamy’s neck.

“I know it’s nearly three thousand miles,” she says, “but whatever happens… it’s not like we’re going to lose each other. We’ll be fine right?”

“Course we will,” he says. “It’s us.”

*

**_Present Day_ **

“Could you help me out instead of just _laughing_?”

“Give me a little credit,” Bellamy grins, “I can do both at the same time.”

Clarke reaches a little further, the stool she’s balancing on teetering dangerously. “Explain to me again why these shelves are too high for any normal person to reach?”

“How would you, my pint-sized friend, know what a normal person can reach?”

“As soon as I get that stupid box,” she mutters, “I’ll throw it at you.”

“I think I’ll be safe for a while then.”

She makes a harrumph of displeasure, stretching up so she’s stood on her toes. The cardboard box is _so close_ , close enough for her to brush the corner of it with her fingertips. Clarke presses her mouth into a thin line and stretches up just another inch higher, but it sends the stool tipping forward and she wobbles dangerously. She winces in preparation for the fall, but it never comes -- Bellamy’s hands catch her waist before she trips off the stool.

“Careful, Princess,” he breathes as she steadies herself on his shoulder.

She blinks. Bellamy’s eyes flit down to her waist -- her shirt had ridden up slightly as she stretched, and he seems to just now note that his fingers rest on her bare skin -- before quickly returning to hers. Clarke can see the bob of his adam’s apple as he swallows.

“See if you’d helped me earlier this wouldn’t have happened,” she murmurs.

“You don’t think _this_ is helping you?” he quirks an eyebrow.

She rolls her eyes at him, and they both snap out of whatever reverie they’d been in. Clarke hops down from the stool and steps away, letting him retrieve the box instead. He pulls it down with infuriating ease, and Clarke is reminded suddenly that the wiry knobbles of his boyhood build has given way to, well, _muscles_. Some of which are showing themselves off very flatteringly in his forearms.

Bellamy grins, cocky, and thrusts the box at her. “There’s about a decade’s worth of _New Yorker_ issues in there. You need to sort them into chronological order and record the publish date of every issue we have on the spreadsheet.”

“Aye aye Captain.”

He gives her a mock salute as she carries the box to a corner, which she ignores, as she does the shout of “and try not to trip over your own feet!”

 

Clarke gets back from a bathroom break after recording the last of the publishing dates to find Octavia’s back from school. Bellamy had gotten another call from his sister’s principal during the lunch break, and clearly, he’s decided to bring it up. Clarke frowns as she watches the scene unfolding in front of her. Bellamy is standing, arms folded across his chest, as Octavia scowls and tries to duck around him and get upstairs.

“Move,” Octavia snaps.

“There was a call from your school today,” Bellamy grits out. “You know what they said?”

“Does it matter if I do?” she shoves him, and Clarke starts. “You’re obviously just going to lecture me on it anyway.”

“ _Alcohol_ ? In your _backpack_? Are you serious?”

“That bitch Melody shouldn’t have been looking through my stuff!”

“You shouldn’t be drinking O! And you certainly shouldn’t be doing it on school premises!”

The younger Blake tugs her bag off her back and all but hurls it at him, ramming it into his stomach. Bellamy flinches, but stays where he is.

“ _Move_!” Octavia shouts.

“Look you’re mad at me, mad at the world, whatever, I get it! But you can’t pull stunts like this Octavia! They will come back and bite you in the ass and they will get in the way of your future--”

“God do you ever _stop_?” she shoves him again.

Clarke pulls her phone out and under the desk, dials Kane’s number. It goes to voicemail. She tries again. Voicemail.

Bellamy moves to catch Octavia’s hand when she tries to shove at him again, and when he catches her wrist she practically claws at him.

“Get _off_ of me!” She kicks at his shin.

“Hey Bellamy?” Clarke is across the shop floor in a moment. “There’s something wrong with the online catalogue.”

Octavia rips her hand away from Bellamy, glowering at Clarke.

Clarke stares coolly back at her, until the girl slinks away and disappears up the stairs.

Bellamy slides down against the wall, sinking to the floor. He’s still holding onto Octavia’s bag like it’s a life raft.

Clarke lowers herself beside him, reaching out to touch his arm. “Hey. You okay?”

He nods. “Fine.”

She doesn’t move.

“I’m losing her Clarke,” he whispers. “Every day I tell myself she’s just a kid going through a hard time, that it’s just a phase she’s going to get through… everyday I keep waiting for it to get easier, but it never does.”

“One day she’s going to see how special you are,” Clarke says, “how lucky she is.”

“Lucky?” he laughs humorlessly. “She’s a teenage orphan stuck in a tiny town that bores her to tears being raised by her godfather’s wallet and a big brother that has no idea what he’s doing.”  
“Hey,” she feels a surprising surge of anger, “everyone has hard times; that doesn’t mean it’s okay for her to take it out on other people. It’s not your responsibility to be her punching bag.”

“My sister, my responsibility,” he says like she knew he would, “I can’t just give up on her. She’s just a kid.”  
“ _So are you_!” and God if she doesn’t want to grab him by the shoulders and just shake him until he gets the message. “Or you should be! You haven’t let yourself be a kid since you started taking care of her, and don’t get me wrong, I think you’re amazing for giving up so much for her. But you don’t have to give up everything, and you certainly don’t have to let her treat you like crap just because you think you owe it to her. Because here’s the thing you’re missing Bell -- I know you guys have lost so much and it’s been so hard, but Octavia is lucky enough to have one thing that no one else does.”

Bellamy looks up at her, uncertain.

“ _You_ , you idiot! She has you!” Clarke wants to tell him that if his sister is developing into an obnoxious, bratty ingrate then it’s in _spite_ of him, not because of him, but she stops herself. “You’re entitled to live your own life Bellamy.”

“And do what with it?” He gets up, staring at the door. “We’re going to lose the shop, Clarke.”

“Bell--”

“We’re able to talk about all this right now because we both know we’re not exactly expecting an influx of customers any time soon. We’re hardly breaking even, and I’m pretty sure Kane is already talking to buyers.”

She doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing she can say that’s going to make this any easier for him.

“All the money we have saved is going to send O to college,” he says, resolute, “that’s what we can afford and it’s what we’re going to do.”  
“Why?” Clarke frowns. “Why can’t it be you? You deserve to go, Bellamy. You’re smarter and more passionate about learning than anyone I know. College is meant for people like you.”

“Nothing is _meant_ for me!” he snaps, “it doesn’t work like that! The world doesn’t owe me anything. I make the choices I have to make and then I live with them.”

The shop door opens and a couple of kids walk in. Bellamy’s on his feet, composed in seconds. Clarke watches his back as he walks away, cheerfully greeting the newest batch of customers. She frowns. He’s pulling books off the shelves, gesticulating passionately with his hands as he explains what each one is about. She can see him, not just as he is now, but as the gangly kid she used to see reading with a flashlight under his blanket, as the wide-eyed middle-schooler discovering _Percy Jackson_ for the first time, as the surly high-schooler who saved his most fearsome scowl for people who tried to talk to him while he was reading. And as the guy who thinks the world doesn’t _owe him_ anything.

 _Bullshit_.

She purses her mouth into a thin line, glancing round quickly to make sure Bellamy doesn’t see her as she slips through the back door and up the stairs.

“Octavia?” she says when she finds the girl’s door, “can we talk?”

*

“Where’s Clarke?” Raven asks unceremoniously, barging past Bellamy into the shop.

“She must be taking stuff into the storeroom or something,” Bellamy says glancing behind him, “why, what’s up?”

“Shouldn’t you know where she is?” Raven demands, “aren’t you her boss or something?”

“Yeah I’ll fire her as soon as she turns up.” He rolls his eyes. “Seriously are you okay?”

Raven tugs on the end of her ponytail, brow furrowed. “I need to speak to her.”

“Uh, okay. Just hang out I guess, she’ll be here soon.”

She swings herself up onto the window seat. Bellamy tries to let her be and just get on with what he’s doing, but Raven’s jiggling her good leg anxiously and fidgeting and generally acting in a way that is supremely _un_ Raven-like.

“Is everything okay?” he ventures.

She gives him a scathing look as if to say _butt out_ , but her expression quickly gives way to one of anxiety. “It’s… complicated.” She picks at a hangnail, frowning. “Okay -- if you tell anyone what I’m about to tell you, I’ll do unspeakable things to your dick with a monkey wrench.”

“Noted.”

“There’s a guy.”

Bellamy’s eyebrows shoot up. “ _Oh_ ?”   
“Shut. Up.” She flips him off for good measure. “There’s a guy I’ve been talking to for, God, years now. We met on Twitter and we’ve been messaging forever and I-- I really like him. I just don’t technically know… who he is.”

He pauses for a moment, trying to gauge how best to respond without prompting Raven to throw something at him. “You realise this sounds like you’ve been taken in by some seventy year old in his parents’ basement, right?”

“It’s _not_ a catfish!” she snaps. “Look, I _know_ this guy alright? I know him better than anyone, and he knows me. The only thing I don’t know for sure is his name.”

“Okay,” he says slowly, not entirely convinced, “so did something happen with Cyrano?”

She rolls her eyes and ignores him. “I think it’s time I met with him, alright? I need to tell him that I--” and then she blushes. Raven Reyes _blushes_. “I need to tell him that I love him.”

Bellamy stares at Raven. Raven stares at the floor.

“Alright,” he says, “uh, why now? You’ve been talking to him for years. Why _now_?”

“Because! I just… there’s not going to be anyone else, okay? There’s nothing else I want, there’s no one else worth waiting for,” she glares at her hands. “I need to do this.”

“Wow. I’m happy for you, I guess?” Bellamy runs a hand through his hair. “And, uh, what does this have to do with Clarke?”

“Oh.” Raven glances up, a small, quiet smile on her face, the kind of smile that promises many more smiles to come. “I don’t know for _sure_ who this guy is, but… I have a pretty good idea. And Clarke can help me get in touch with him. I think I know where he got his username from.” He notices then that there’s a book in her hands that she keeps fiddling with like it’s some sort of lucky charm.

And then he sees the title. Slowly, a cold pool of dread uncoils in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah?” he asks, “who’re you thinking?”

“Well, if I’m right, which I hope I am,” Raven admits, and Bellamy has to turn away from her, from her battered copy of _The Time Machine_ , so that she can’t see his eyes close as he knows, with a terrible certainty, that she will be right, as Raven always is, “then it’s Wells. Wells Jaha.”

*

Octavia’s room honestly isn’t as terrible as Clarke was expecting, but given her expectations had fallen somewhere between “crack den” and “mass grave,” it had been a low bar to clear.

Instead, it’s fairly standard teenage girl fair, with clothes and makeup strewn across the floor, and a couple of Hot Topic-style posters tacked up above the dressing table.

“What?” the younger girl asks. She’s splayed on her bed, scrolling through her phone.

“Have you considered not being such a bitch to your brother?”

Octavia stares at her. “What did you call me?!”

“I get it,” she says, toeing at a pair of jeans tossed three feet from the laundry hamper, “your whole deal. Gotta stand up to the man and stuff, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

Clarke sighs, folding her arms. “Look whatever tough shit you’re going through must suck, that’s fine. But it’s not Bellamy’s fault and he shouldn’t have to be your personal punching bag just to make you feel better. He does so much for you because he loves you. The least you could do is not attack him for it.”

Octavia pushes herself upright, shoving off the bed and marching across the room to stare Clarke in the face. She’s almost as tall as Clarke now, and her eyes are fierce, but Clarke doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t feel much except a hot pulse of anger at the girl for terrorising her brother, for letting him believe that he deserves her cruel words and bruising fists.

“What makes you think you get to come in here and lecture me about my life?” Octavia demands. “What goes on between me and my brother is none of your business!”  
“You made it my business when you decided to treat my best friend like crap in front of me!”   
Octavia scoffs. “Your best friend? _Please_ \-- you ignored him for years because you were so bitter he didn’t want to get into your pants!”

Clarke doesn’t flinch, but only because she refuses to let the petulant child in front of her think she has the upper hand.

“Listen to me,” she says, leaning close, “Bellamy puts up with everything because he loves you and he’d do anything for you, and he thinks you’re his responsibility. Luckily for me, I don’t have any of those concerns so I can talk to you straight: right now, people will make excuses for you because you’re a kid and you’ve gone through some stuff and you’re just acting up. But no one seems to get that Bellamy was also a kid, and went through the same stuff, only he never had the time to _act up_ because he was too busy looking after you!”   
“I didn’t ask him to!” Octavia shouts. “I never wanted him _controlling my life_!”

“He’s looking out for you!” Clarke yells back, “he’s doing everything he can, giving up everything he has, for you! And you don’t even appreciate how lucky you are to have a brother who cares so much! You don’t get how lucky you are to have a brother who’s _ali_ \--”

“What’s going on?” Bellamy cries, bursting in through the door, “I heard shouting!”

Raven appears behind him, looking concerned. “Okay so you’re clearly dealing with… something, so I’m just going to go -- Clarke I need to talk to you later, okay?”

Clarke nods tersely as Raven slips away, and Bellamy throws a panicked glance between them.

“Call off your attack dog, Bellamy!” Octavia snaps.

“What happened?” he demands, “is everything okay?”

“No!” his sister spits, “she just came in here and started _shrieking_ at me like a _psycho_ lecturing me about not being nice enough to you or something. I can’t believe you’re getting your friends to come for me now!”

“Bellamy didn’t ask me to, Octavia,” Clarke grits out, “I managed this all by myself.”

Bellamy still looks shell-shocked as Octavia snaps “would you both just _leave me alone_!” and shoves them out, slamming her door behind them.

He remains silent as they go back downstairs. She waits for him to speak, but he doesn’t.

“I’m sorry, okay?” she says, trying to break the quiet. “I know it wasn’t my place. And she’s a kid.”

Silence.

“And I know it probably doesn’t do you any favours to have me barging in and shouting where I wasn’t invited. I just got so _mad_ at the way she was treating you, because I know she’s young but… you deserve so much better Bellamy.”

Still, he says nothing.

Clarke sighs, bracing herself for the worst. “I know you might hate me for this. And I’m sorry. I can let you… process this. If you want.” He doesn’t move. “Okay,” Clarke nods, feeling her stomach sink, “okay I’m just going to get back to--”

And then he hugs her.

She doesn’t know how it happens or when exactly, but one moment he’s standing stock-still, staring blankly into space, and the next, he’s launched himself across the room, wrapped his arms around her, buried his face in her neck.

The shock wears off quickly, and Clarke pulls him into her, closes her eyes as she feels his shuddering breaths against her collarbone.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, “thank you. For -- for seeing her.”

Clarke pulls him closer, holds him so tightly she can feel their hearts beating against each other.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he admits, “and I should be furious. But… God, Clarke, I’m so scared I’m losing her.” When he steps back it’s with a little gasp, like it physically hurts to wrench himself away from her. “I just to do right by her. And she fucking hates me, and it’s so _hard_ to know if it’s just her, or if it it’s because I’m screwing up, and there’s no one who can tell me what I’m doing wrong and--” he swipes a hand down over his face, waiting a moment to compose himself.

“Are you alright?” he asks her.

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Seriously?”

Bellamy’s mouth quirks in a sheepish smile. “I know, I know. But I just… she can say some pretty harsh things so I thought--”

“I’m fine,” she cuts him off, squeezing his hand. She doesn’t mention Octavia’s remark about Clarke “wanting to get into Bellamy’s pants.” It’s just Octavia being Octavia after all; there’s no way she actually knows what happened. “You okay?”  
Bellamy makes his way back behind the counter, wiping his hands down on his jeans. His voice sounds rough, like its been torn around the edges. “I have to be.”

*

What’s more surprising than anything is how _un_ surprised he is that Clarke sticks around after closing. He doesn’t examine the little trip his heartbeat makes when he realises how implicitly he once more trusts that she’ll be there when he needs her. She beckons for him to follow her to the SF/F shelves, and he smiles. They used to spend hours lounging on the aisles between these stacks as children, and as they lower themselves to the floor now, he’s as comfortable as if they’d draped themselves in an old blanket.

“Truth or dare?” she asks, without preamble.

“Dare.”

“I dare you to dog ear a page of any book in the store.”

He scowls at her. “I’m not going to _desecrate_ a--”

“Chicken much?”

With a huff, he pushes up to his feet, retrieves a copy of _The Fountainhead_ and makes a show of folding one of the corners of a page down, though he can’t quite hold back a wince.

Clarke offers him a light smattering of applause as he puts the book back.

“Okay,” he says, sitting back down and nudging her with his foot. “Now you. Truth or dare.”

“Truth,” she says, ignoring his booing.

“How many people have you dated since moving away.”  
“Two, officially. And one casual thing. Truth or dare?”   
“Truth.”

“Who did you lose your virginity to?”

“Bree Forsythe at Homecoming.”

“Huh,” Clarke looks at him consideringly. “I’d have guessed Roma Johnson.”

Bellamy tilts his head trying to place the girl. “Oh yeah, didn’t I go on a date with her or something way back in the day?” Why Clarke would bring her up, he has no idea. “Truth or dare?”  
“Truth.”

“You’re no fun, Princess.”  
“ _Truth_.”

“Did you ever think about contacting me while you were in Boston?” He probably shouldn’t have asked that. But the words are out now.

“Yes,” she says without hesitating. “Yes I did.”

He’s about to press, to ask why she didn’t, but Clarke says “your turn” and he picks dare.

“I dare you to lick the bottom of your shoe.”  
With a _harrumph_ of disgust, he does. “Truth or dare?”

She meets his eyes challengingly. “Dare.”

“I dare you to let me text one person from your phone right now.”  
“You’re diabolical,” she grumbles, handing her phone over and craning over him so she can see who he chooses. Bellamy tries unsuccessfully to lean away as he settles on Lexa, her ex, and Clarke lunges for the phone.

“No, absolutely not!”

“It was the _dare_ \--”

“Give that back--”

“Come on, Princess, just--”

They dissolve into breathless peals of laughter as Clarke grabs for the phone and it clatters from his grasp. Clarke makes a final lunge for it, but she stumbles, and it sends her crashing down so she lands on top of him.

“Oof!” Bellamy groans theatrically though he’s still laughing, and Clarke squirms a little attempting to right herself.

“Sorry,” she says, grinning.

She’s still on top of him, he notes, one leg either side of his hips, her arms bracketing his shoulders. She raises herself on her elbows so her weight’s not completely on him, but she’s still so _close_. Bellamy can feel the ends of her hair tickling the sides of his face.

Clarke swallows, and he can see the bob and curve of her throat -- it’s right in front of him.

“I should probably get up,” she murmurs.

“I dare you to kiss me.” The words slip out before he even really thinks them, before he considers the consequences. But they’re out, and they hang in the air like a livewire.

“You didn’t ask me if I wanted truth or dare,” she says, her voice still no louder than a whisper.

“Oh.” He curls and uncurls his fingers, hoping to excise some of his discomfort. “Sorry. I, uh--”

She kisses him.

It’s just that, at first, the quick press of her lips to his, so chaste and fleeting it could be dismissed as just something friends do. He should probably leave it there. That’s all the feeble excuse of a “dare” will really allow.

She’s still right there though, only pulling back enough that their lips are a hair’s breadth apart -- their noses are still brushing, their foreheads still touch.

She’s looking at him, right at him, right into his eyes.

He surges up. Bellamy doesn’t know from where he summons the sudden grace with which he moves, but in one fluid motion, his arms go around her and he draws them both upright, so that his back is pressed against the shelf and her legs straddle his waist.

There’s nothing about the way their lips meet this time that could be called either chaste or fleeting. He can taste her now, her mouth opens in a little gasp that makes his fingers tighten on her waist as his tongue slips into her mouth. She nips at his lower lip and presses herself closer to him. He doesn’t know if he’s ever been so _aware_ of another person’s body in his life; the heat from every part of her seems to seep into him, and he feels like he’s stealing every breath from her mouth. They only pull away to breathe, and even then Bellamy doesn’t let the separation interrupt him. He doesn’t want to stop, not now, not ever. He doesn’t think he could if he tried. He moves his mouth to her neck, revelling in the little gasps and sighs and moans she makes as he kisses and bites and sucks his way down. Somehow, they end up on the floor again, this time with Clarke beneath him. He takes a moment to admire the way her hair is fanned around her head like the rays of the sun, but then her arms come up around his neck and tug him down, and his attention is quickly diverted to biting and sucking on her clavicle until a mark blooms there. He can hear her breathy little sounds right in his ear and they drive him wild, send him back to kiss her senseless so that she’ll make them again. Somewhere in the haze of heat, he notes that her hands are exploring the expanse of his back under his shirt. He rucks her own shirt up, feeling the burning of her skin, noting the hitch in her breath as he fingers the edge of her bra. There’s a flash of teeth to the kiss now, a desperation that he can’t shake, a--

“Someone down there?”

They both stiffen and spring apart as Marcus’s voice carries downstairs. It’s an implicit agreement between them that they won’t get found like this.

“Hello?” he calls again.

Another excruciating moment and the sound of his bedroom door shutting lets them both exhale.

He takes her in then, the sight of her, and Bellamy feels something lodge in his throat; maybe his heart.

It’s Clarke, _his_ Clarke, familiar as ever and yet unlike anything he’s seen before. Her pupils are blown bright and wide, her cheeks are flushed, a flush that travels down her neck and lower and shows no sign of stopping; her lips are swollen, almost bruised.

 _I did that_. The thought sends a strange primal thrill of satisfaction through him, and he blinks, hoisting himself off and away from her quickly.

There’s a quiet rustle of coughs and shuffling for a moment as they both adjust their shirts and mat their hair down.

“Well,” Clarke says in a low hoarse voice. “You’ve certainly gotten better at that.”

Bellamy laughs uncertainly. “How would you know?”

He might not have noticed if it was anyone but Clarke, if he wasn’t hyper aware of every minute movement she made, but he _does_ notice, the faltering of her hands as she tries to tie her hair back.

Automatically, he shifts behind her to pull her hair back himself, and starts braiding it, pretending he doesn’t feel the way she stiffens slightly, goes still as death.

“What do you— you mean you don’t…” Clarke tails off.

“Don’t what?” he asks, tying the plait off, brushing the back of her neck with the tips of his fingers as he lets the hair go.

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.” She laughs. “It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Clarke…”

She stands up. “I should probably go home.”

Bellamy frowns. “You don’t wanna stay the night,”

She shakes her head. “I’m supposed to call my mom with Callie tomorrow morning, I should get back.”

“Are we good?” he asks, frowning. “This…”

“Truth or dare is truth or dare,” she waves him off. “What goes here stays here. We’re good, Bellamy. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” he says, “yeah okay.”

She smiles and hugs him and leaves like it’s any other night. Which is good. Perfect, even. At least, that’s what he tells himself.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finger guns*
> 
> All I'm saying is that Chapter 4 is still being written but I'm pretty sure it's scientifically proven that comments make me write faster so....


	4. iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, we've reached the end at last! Thank you so much to everyone who's stuck around from the start, to everyone who waited to see this story completed and binged it, to everyone who's read and kudosed and commented -- your support means the world <3
> 
> Also thanks as always to my incomparable beta, Winter, without whom this story would be an illegible mess. Winter, I owe you many drinks.
> 
> And sorry for the delay in posting this -- I have just gone back for my second year at uni, and it's been absolultely manic, with minimal writing time. Hopefully this monster length chapter makes up for the wait. And *hopefully* you all enjoy this ending. 
> 
> Thank you all for joining me on this wild ride with what is now officially the longest thing I've ever written and completed (!!) and without further ado, here's the final chapter.

**_June 2014_ **

The house thrums with music and voices and people who seem to spill out of it, as though the bricks are bursting at the seams. As soon as the door opens the haze of body heat and marijuana smoke hits Clarke like a train. 

“Well this is gonna be fun,” Wells grumbles, holding the door open for her.

“You’re the one that insisted we come to the after party,” she reminds him.

“After parties are integral parts of the high school experience,” he reminds her, “the school dance is just a precursor. Besides, it’s not like you  _ weren’t  _ going to come anyway since  _ Bellamy’s  _ gonna be here.”

Clarke scowls and swats at him. “Shut up.”   


Wells shakes her off, grinning. “I’m going to go get a drink, you want anything?”   


“Not right now,” she says, and he waves at her as he wanders off.

Clarke starts picking her way through the crowd of people, stopping occasionally to greet people she knows from various classes or clubs. She’s still in the dress she was wearing at the dance, and is careful to hold the hem up so it doesn’t drag. 

“ _ Claaaaaaarke _ !” Bellamy more-or-less slams into her from behind, engulfing her in a bear hug with such force that she staggers a little and has to clutch his forearms for support. “You’re here!”

“I sure am,” she laughs, turning to hug him properly. “You’ve crushed my dress,” she grumbles.

Bellamy looks suitably chastened. “Sorry,” he says, patting at her as though attempting to smooth out the wrinkles. “You looked so pretty tonight,” he assures her, “ _ princess _ .”

It makes her giggle. “You drunk, Bellamy?”

His eyes widen. “No!” He grins impishly then, and taps the side of his nose. “ _ Maaaaybe _ . Shhh…”

Clarke pats his arm and lets him drag her to the kitchen and accepts a cup of her own. 

It’s one of those nights that feels  _ good _ , warm and happy in a way that feels like it’s settling into the marrow of her bones, like she can feel a memory being made as it happens. The alcohol makes everything feel slow and hazy and comfortable and she is conscious of burrowing into Bellamy’s side, letting herself lean closer each time he presses his mouth to her ear to talk so she can hear him. 

Throughout the night, classmates come up to her and hug her and tell her good luck and they’ll miss her, and after about the seventh time this happens, she realises Bellamy looks sullen. 

“Hey,” she nudges him. “Hey. Hey.  _ Bellamy _ ,” she whines when he just grunts in response. 

“You’re such a  _ brat _ ,” he grumbles, pinning her arms to her sides to stop her from jostling him. “What d’you want?”

“Why’re you so grumpy?” she demands. 

“Am not!”

“You so are! You look like the Grinch!”

“Do not!” he retorts hotly. 

Clarke pouts at him, and he sighs. “ _ Fine _ . I’m grumpy.”   


“ _ Why _ ?”

Bellamy gets up abruptly, ungraceful in his inebriated state, and shoves the door to the back porch open. There’s an old swing on the decking that they flop on now, kicking off with their feet so they sway gently. 

“Okay,” Clarke prods him in the side, “now you gotta tell me why you’re so mad.”

He huffs. “It’s just -- all those people coming up and saying they’re gonna  _ miss  _ you ‘n stuff… they’re so  _ phony _ .”

“Phony?”

“Yeah!”

She grins. “Okay Holden, you got me. Why’re they phony?”

Bellamy pauses to high-five her, which he does every time she successfully makes a literary reference -- he calls it positive reinforcement. Then he flops his head back and drapes his arm across his eyes so he looks like a ganglier, drunker version of the damsels being tended to be satyrs and cherubs in those classical paintings of Greek myths he keeps pinning to the corkboard in his room. 

“They’ll be  _ fine _ ,” he mutters, “after you leave. Like… whatever. Oh Clarke’s gone? Shucks! Now whaddya want for lunch?” he waves a hand in the air to signal his disgust. “Fine.”

“Wow  _ thanks _ .”

“I didn’t mean -- ugh.” He lifts his arm to peek at her. “No one’s going to miss you as much as I am,” he whines, “they’re not losing their best friend.”

“You’re not losing me silly,” she says, tugging at his arm until he drapes it around her. Then, more softly. “I don’t want to go so far away from you. It’s scary.” She worries her lip

“Scary?” he pulls her closer like he can protect her from some tangible threat that looms nearby. The motion sends a thrill down her spine. “I don’t want you to be scared, Clarke. Boston is cool,” he allows, begrudgingly. 

“But it’s three hours ahead of us!” she exclaims. “That’s like… me having to go to the future.  _ Alone _ !”

“So you can warn me what happens!” he retorts, eyes wide with excitement and alcohol. “And you’ll get to see actual seasons! You have to snapchat me if there’s orange leaves and snow and stuff!”

“You gotta come see it for yourself,” she says, and he nods fervently.

“Obviously!”

“You’re really gonna visit me?” she asks shyly.

“ _ Yeah _ . Don’t look so surprised Princess, you know I’d follow you anywhere.”

She blinks. That’s not the kind of thing anyone says in real life. It should sound cheesy or creepy or ridiculous. But it’s Bellamy, and he looks so earnest and hopeful as he says it, the mixture of moonlight and streetlights casting soft shadows in a patchwork across his face. It doesn’t sound cheesy or creepy or ridiculous. 

“I’d follow you too,” she whispers, “wherever you took me.”

Clarke registers lots of random details in the seconds before it happens -- there’s a moment when everything slows down, and she can feel where the beading of her dress digs into her sides, she can see a couple of moths hovering around the flickering porch light, she can hear the beats of whatever song is playing inside, she can smell the aroma of weed and cigarette smoke that hang around the house like an old cloak -- and then everything seems to happen at once, and Bellamy’s hands are in her hair and his mouth is on her mouth and they’re kissing. Her and Bellamy.  _ Kissing _ .    
It’s a little awkward for a moment, a little sloppy and off-kilter. It takes her a few tries to decide where to put her hands, and she has to shuffle slightly so the angle of her neck isn’t quite as odd, but -- they’re kissing. 

It’s only when he pulls away that Clarke realises how long it’s been since she last took a breath; her fingers drift to her lips of their own accord, grazing her mouth as though they can’t believe what it just did. 

“We’ll be fine,” Bellamy says, taking her hand and kicking at the floor so the swing starts moving again, and his voice is so sure and confident that she believes him. She can almost feel it, in her throat and in her chest, the force with which she loves him. 

It’s hard to say how long they stay out there, talking about everything and nothing and swinging gently with the breeze, before Miller wanders out and finds them.

“You guys ready to go? My cousin says he’ll drop us home.”

Clarke nudges Bellamy awake from where he’s fallen asleep on her shoulder. He smiles at her dopily and they all pile in the car.

She tries to catch his eye when they pull up outside Second Dawn, but he’s out and inside before she can.

_ You all good?  _ she texts him.

The car ride passes in a mostly sleepy silence, but Clarke keeps checking her phone. She texts him again, a simple,  _ can we talk _ ? but there’s still no reply. By the time Miller’s cousin pulls up at her place, she’s officially frantic. It’s not like Bellamy not to respond to her texts, and she knows he had his phone on him. She can’t seem to focus on anything else as she and Wells make their way back into the house. Holding her breath, Clarke dials his number. It goes to voicemail.  _ It’s fine _ , she tells herself,  _ he probably put his phone down somewhere and went to the bathroom _ . She tries his number once more. Voicemail.  _ He’s  _ not  _ avoiding you. He wouldn’t _ .

“How was your night?” Wells asks her as they brush their teeth. “Anything exciting? Anything you want to share with the class?”

Clarke makes sure to take her time to spit out the toothpaste and rinse out her mouth before replying: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Uh-uh.”   


“Wells!”

“ _ Clarke _ !” He boops her nose when she glowers at him. “All I’m saying,” he sighs, “is we’re leaving tomorrow. If there’s something you think you should talk to B-- to  _ someone _ about. Do it now.” 

She stares after him as he leaves. Her hands drifts to her mouth again before she catches herself. This wasn’t her first kiss. But it feels like the most important one. It feels like the first one that counts. She could always wait until tomorrow, see if he picks up his phone and is ready to talk about it then. She thinks of his face again, as she flops onto her bed with a notepad and a pen, thinks of how he’d looked in those moments just after he’d pulled back. It’s something she thinks she’ll remember forever -- the way he looked and the way she felt looking at him. You can’t forget something like that. She could wait until tomorrow.

Clarke looks down at the paper in her hands again. Taking a deep breath, she begins to write. 

*

**_Present Day_ **

It’s one of those things that seems obvious yet feels more and more momentous each time you think about it, but you can’t un-kiss someone. You can’t un-know what is to kiss them, to feel their mouth move against yours, to feel the heat of their body and the smoothness of their skin underneath you. Kissing a person gives you a very specific kind of knowledge of them, and it’s a knowledge that suffuses the air until it seems to crackle with it whenever you’re near that person. It lies there, a silent possibly, a constant quiet reminder that you  _ could  _ be doing this whenever you’re doing anything else at all. 

And it’s inconvenient as fuck. 

Bellamy would very much  _ like  _ to say he’s the upstanding guy who can keep his thoughts about his coworker strictly professional, at least during the work day, but… he glances over to where Clarke is arranging one of the shelves in alphabetical order. She catches his gaze and shoots him a smile before turning her attention back to her work. Clarke doesn’t seem to feel anything is at all awkward or strange about the fact that the last time they were in this shop together he’d had his hands up her shirt and his tongue in her mouth. Which is fine. Clarke is the one acting rationally; he just needs to get a grip. 

“You want me to hang on to these?” she asks, waving a handful of thin, faded papers that she’s pulled out from old books. “It’s just a couple of grocery receipts people were using as bookmarks.”

“Just leave those in the book,” he says “not important.”

She flashes him a smile and puts them back. Bellamy clears his throat and looks away. 

“You okay?” Clarke asks. 

“Yeah.” He swivels aways quickly -- and finds himself facing the SF/F shelves again. He’s hit with images of that night again, the way Clarke looked in those seconds after they broke away, wide-eyed and panting, her hair rucked up with flyaway where he’d run his hands through it… 

_ Get. A. Fucking. Grip.  _

The buzz of his phone receiving a text snaps him out of his reverie.

**Marcus Kane:** Meet me in my office ASAP. 

**Marcus Kane:** Let Clarke handle the rest of your shift.

Ordinarily, it would irk him, Kane’s willingness to just pluck him out of the shop like it’s unimportant. But today? 

He glances at Clarke -- she’s leaning on a low bookcase, flipping through a copy of  _ Cat’s Eye _ . His gaze tracks the movement of her hand as she brushes a stray curl behind her ear. 

Today, he’ll take it.

“I gotta step out for a little bit,” he said, “will you be okay covering the store until then?”

“Yeah,” she says, “I got it. Everything okay?” 

“Guess I’ll find out soon,” he says. He hopes she doesn’t notice how fast he leaves.    
  


Kane’s office isn’t too far, a fifteen minute walk a couple of blocks from the main drag of the high street. He’s focusing intently on his monitor when Bellamy walks in, and he stands up.

“Ah, you made it. Have a seat.”

Bellamy stays standing. “What’s up?” 

Kane regards him for a moment, and Bellamy can tell he’s deciding how much of a preamble to bother with. Kane always has the air of a vague awareness that he  _ should  _ appear nurturing and paternal, without seeming to have much idea how to actually do so. 

“You’re a responsible boy, Bellamy,” he says eventually. “You understand that in life it’s sometimes important for us to make difficult choices so that things can be…better overall. Sometimes the toughest pills to swallow are the ones we need the most.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sure you’ve noticed that despite all our hard work,” Kane continues, “the store hasn’t had the kind of growth or summer boom we’d hoped for.”   
Bellamy keeps his face impassive, resisting the impulse to correct his guardian with a terse “ _ my  _ hard work.”

“And I know that place means a lot to you Bellamy, which is why I know it may be hard for you to say goodbye. But the fact is that it’s no longer financially viable for us to hang onto it. It’s losing us money, money that we don’t have. You know I’ve had the place on the market for a while now. And…” Kane glances at Bellamy, seemingly awaiting some kind of interjection. None comes. “I’ve decided to accept an offer. It’s a generous one, more than we were hoping for. I think they said they’re opening a boutique of some kind.”

Kane looks at Bellamy. Bellamy stares back.

“Now obviously, some of the money will have to go towards pending expenses -- new accommodation, bills, those kinds of thing. But I’ve decided that the lion’s share is yours, Bellamy. The shop was more yours than anyone else’s -- it’s only fair that the earnings go to you to. It’s your choice what you decide to do with -- there’s a lot of it.”

“How long?”   


“Sorry?”

“Before we’re done. Before we close up. How long?”

“Two weeks.” 

Bellamy nods. “Okay,” he stands up. “Okay thanks for letting me know. I have to get back to my shift now.”

Kane calls something after him but Bellamy doesn’t hear him. He turns and starts walking, out of the room, out of the office. He doesn’t stop until he’s back, standing in front of the shop window and trying to imagine it empty.

*   
There’s a little crack in her wall that she can’t stop staring at. Crack might not be the right word for it, it’s more of a hole, really. Clarke wonders where it came from -- a nail, maybe? The kind someone must have hung a painting from perhaps. It’s a tiny little cavity, the smallest aberration on an otherwise completely unmarred surface. At a glance, the wall is an unremarkable expanse of smooth off-white. But the hole is there, and now she knows it, Clarke can’t seem to see anything else. 

With a sigh, she tosses in her bed to face the ceiling instead. She hadn’t wanted to leave Bellamy by himself after closing, not with how stricken he looked after telling her he was losing the shop. But he’d insisted on a night alone in the shop, so she had. Besides, it would probably have been disastrous for her if she had stayed. She closes her eyes as she remembers, for what feels like the millionth time, the last night she had been in the shop. All things considered, Clarke thinks she’s done a pretty good job at maintaining some semblance of composure. She doesn’t think Bellamy’s guessed that she relived that damn kiss every time he so much as looked in her direction. 

_ It’s not fair. _ That’s the thought that keeps coursing through her mind with an unyielding, childish petulance. It’s just not fair. Clarke feels like she’s been broken to pieces and remade in an entirely new shape since that first kiss they’d shared all those years ago -- the one he doesn’t remember -- so much has happened, it could have been a lifetime ago. And yet here she is again, somehow, in the same place, lying awake in the same town and unable to shake the memory of a kiss with the same boy. 

It’s not fair at all.

She’s hit in that moment by a sudden, sharp longing to speak to Wells. The grief is funny like that, how it seems to be getting better, ebbing into something softer, easier to handle, before suddenly striking her in the chest like a physical blow. Clarke wonders if it makes her selfish, the fact that she feels his loss most keenly in those moments when she needs him to help  _ her _ , when  _ she _ sees the sea and remembers how he died, when she feels  _ her own  _ life lacking him. There’s something wrong, surely, with the fact that she spends more time mourning what her life could have been like with Wells still here than she does the life Wells never had. Guilt curdles into a lump in her throat.  _ Wells will never have this _ , she realises numbly,  _ Wells will never sit on this bed or stare at this wall. Wells will never tell me about how he broke his heart once and is scared of doing it again. Wells won’t have any kisses to think about as he lies awake at night _ .

She’s fumbling for the photo at her bedside before she knows what she’s doing, grasping it with trembling fingers and allowing herself to look at it, really look at it, for the first time since she put it there at the beginning of summer. Baby Wells grins at her, frozen in time, not knowing any better, not knowing there’s anything in store for him ahead of a beautiful summer day, not knowing that one day he’ll come back to an ocean like the one he plays in and never leave again. Clarke doesn’t realise she’s crying until she sees teardrops land on the glass of the picture. She sets it down, wiping at her face. She wants, more than anything just to  _ talk  _ to him, to flop face-first into her pillow ranting about how she can’t stop thinking about stupid Bellamy and his stupid hands and his stupid  _ lips  _ even though that’s all supposed to be behind her, and to know that Wells would be listening to it all, wry smile on his lips as he’d pat her head in sympathy, nodding along before sighing and asking if she’d considered “just  _ talking  _ to Bellamy, silly?” 

_ Bellamy _ .

She pulls her blanket all the way over her head, muffling her face in it like it can stop her brain from working. It was just a stupid kiss with a stupid boy, a stupid boy who’s so stupid he doesn’t even remember their _first_ stupid kiss. Clarke groans tossing over to try and get comfortable. 

Bellamy Blake, it would seem, has found his way under her skin again. And this time -- well this time she knows enough to nip it in the bud.

 

When she walks into the shop next day, Bellamy’s pulling up a pair of tables outside. 

“We’re going to sell as much stock as possible, so it’s three trade paperbacks for $2 over here,” he nods at the tabletop.   
Clarke skirts around Bellamy to edge back into the shop, determinedly  _ not  _ stopping when he places a hand on her back to steady her. The boxes are heavy, but she wrangles them outside. She’s struggling to lift one of them onto the table when she feels her phone buzz in her back pocket. She reaches for it on a reflex, and realises her mistake a split second too late. The box drops from her hands.

And directly into Bellamy’s

“How do you  _ do  _ that?” she grumbles.

“You’re welcome,” he grins, setting the box firmly on the table.

“Seriously, it’s weird. Do you have like a  _ someone needs help  _ Bat Signal that just teleports you places?”   


“Not sure that’s how the Bat Signal works, Princess.”

She rolls her eyes at him and fishes the phone from her back pocket properly. “It’s Raven,” she says, glancing at the message. “She wants to get dinner after closing.”

Clarke barely thinks anything of it, assuming Raven just wants to start getting one-on-one time with her friends in as she gets closer and closer to leaving for college. But then she sees Bellamy’s face.

“You okay?” she asks. “Bellamy?”

He shakes himself slightly. “Look, Clarke… I think I know why she wants to speak to you.”   
She looks at him. 

Bellamy sighs, and then hoists himself up on the tabletop, patting the place next to him. After a beat, she sits beside him. 

“What’s going on, Bell?”

“Okay,” he says, “there’s no easy way of saying this but --”

Bellamy pauses, and then takes her hand. She squeezes his fingers. 

He looks at where their hands are joined. “I think it’s about Wells.”   
*

The coffee has gone cold by the time Bellamy gets round to finishing it, but he barely notices. He crumples up the paper cup and throws it in the nearest trash can, before trying to resettle on the park bench. He’s been trying to read for the past hour, but he can’t focus. Waiting around for something to happen has never exactly been his forte, and when the “something” involves two people he cares about… he shifts in the bench again.

Eventually, the restlessness gets the best of him, and he decides to take a walk. There’s a chill in the air this time of the evening, and he shoves his hands in his pockets. It’s not much better than being on the park bench, but at least he’s moving. He tries to focus on the park around him, the trees and the picnic tables and the joggers in the distance -- anything that stops him from wondering how Clarke and Raven are doing. Still, nothing really seems to work until one of the joggers comes to a stop in front of him.

“Gina,” he says as she pulls her earphones out and smiles at him, “hi.”

“Hey!” She goes in for a hug, pulling him close before letting him go. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you.”   


“Yeah?”   


“Yeah! I just wanted to say congratulations!”   


“What?”   


“I heard you found a buyer for the store,” she says, “that’s great!” 

“Oh,” he rubs at the back of his neck, a little uncertain. “Thanks.”   
“Just think of what this means,” she bounces a little on the balls of her feet. “You could go to college, you could travel -- you can finally get out of the funk you’ve been in.” 

He smiles at her. “It’s pretty cool, I guess.”

Gina reaches out to touch his arm. “Seriously. I’m really happy for you.”   
He doesn’t really know what to say to that. They stay there for a moment, her hand lingering on his arm until she moves to put her earbuds back in. “Well I got to go,” she says, and then leans forward and kisses his cheek. “I’ll see you round!” 

Bellamy pulls his phone back out as soon as Gina returns to her jog. No messages yet. He itches to call Clarke himself, but holds off. 

He can’t imagine how Raven is going to take this news. And Clarke? Bellamy grimaces, remembering the state she’d been in when she’d turned up at the bookstore after reading his letter. For her, talking about Wells isn’t a matter of reopening old wounds so much as rubbing salt in fresh ones. His heart twists, thinking of the look on her face when he’d told her about Raven and Wells. It’s not an expression he wants to see on her ever again. It scares him a little, the fierceness with which he’s determined to protect her from it. 

It’s a stupid thought -- she doesn’t need him. 

But he thinks it nonetheless. 

*

Traditionally, time is supposed to crawl when you’re worried. But this isn’t like that. Clarke can feel the minutes slipping through her fingers like sand, and she can’t scrabble to hold onto them fast enough. 

She doesn’t want to tell Raven. She doesn’t want to take this precious version of Wells that her friend is in love with and snuff him out with a few bleak words. She wants it to last forever for Raven, if not for herself. Briefly, wildly, she considers turning and running. Texting Raven that she couldn’t make it, that they can catch up later. Letting Raven keep Wells alive, a precious secret to hold close to her heart and never let go.

She wants to do all of that. She would. If not for the knowledge that Wells would never forgive her.

Clarke’s holding two cups of coffee when Raven sees her. She hands Raven one of the cups and Raven smiles and Clarke clasps her own cup with both hands to try and hide the trembling. 

“Hey,” Raven says. She looks a little nervous. “How’s it going?”   


“I think Bellamy told me what you want to talk about.”   


“Figures. He’s such a mother hen I should have known he’d try to intervene and make things go smoothly.”

Clarke smiles thinly. “Well. That’s Bellamy for you.” They sit on a bench, half-turned to each other.

“Yeah.” Raven laughs. “He didn’t need to though. I’m -- I’m not nervous, Clarke. I’m not worried.”   


“No?”   


“I love him.” Raven clears her throat, speaks a little more loudly. “I love Wells. I know I do, so I’m not scared about what happens now or what he says. I just want to tell him.”

_ Don’t run _ .  _ Don’t run _ .  _ Don’t run _ .

Clarke takes a deep breath. “I’m not sure how to do this,” she admits. “I guess I should start by saying I haven’t been honest with you since I got back.”   
Raven arches an eyebrow. “No?”

And so Clarke tells her. 

Raven doesn’t interrupt as she speaks, doesn’t seem to react at all in fact. The only proof Clarke has that the other girl hears a word she says is when Raven grabs her hand suddenly, gripping it so hard Clarke’s fingers throb. When they were younger, Raven would take her hand and march off in this direction or that, chattering loudly about what game they would play or what she’d built with her Legos. Clarke had always assumed it was so Raven could keep a hold of her, make sure Clarke wouldn’t get lost in the wake of the brilliance of the Raven Reyes whirlwind. She glances down at where their hands join. Now, she wonders whether it wasn’t so much to keep Clarke from getting left behind as it was to make sure she didn’t run away. Didn’t leave Raven there, alone and untethered. She squeezes Raven’s hand back.

“And that’s pretty much everything,” she finishes, swallowing past the lump in her throat. “I’m so sorry. For everything. For not telling you the truth before.”

She can see the words reach Raven -- they don’t land on her so much as they seem to seep through her; it’s as though Clarke can see Raven, the essence of who she is, shift slightly. Cloud over with a shadow that Clarke knows only to well can never be shaken off.

“I get why you didn’t.”

“I would have. If I’d known.” 

“It’s okay. You didn’t know. No one did.” And then she lets out a sob. It’s a single, choked sound, like it’s been wrenched from her, like it’s cost her something. 

Clarke’s arms go around her automatically; she rests her head on Raven’s as the other girl cries, really cries, face buried in Clarke’s shoulder. 

“I never told him,” she says, “god, Clarke, I never fucking told him. I didn’t even know it was him at first. I fell in love with him and I never even  _ knew  _ it.”

“You knew,” Clarke says, her grip on Raven tightening, “you knew, alright? You knew Wells and you fell in love with him. That’s all that matters.”

“But he’ll never know.” Raven gets up suddenly, turns away so Clarke can’t see her face. “I love him and he never knew and now he never will. This is bullshit. Fuck, this is such bullshit.” 

“I know.” Clarke wipes her nose. 

Raven crumples back down on the bench, like she’s deflating, wiping at the tears. “Thank you,” she rasps. “For telling me.”

“Of course. I’m so sorry.”

She nods, swallows. “Here.”

Clarke looks at the folded slip of paper that Raven digs from her pocket and hands her.

“I was going to give this to you anyway. To give to him.”

It seems to burn in her hand. Another letter, another heartbreak. 

“Thank you,” Clarke says quietly. “For loving him. For being someone he fell in love with. Thank you for giving him that.” She hands the letter back to Raven. “You should keep this though. It’s between you two. And it’s real. Keep this and remember that.”

*

**_June 2014_ **

“Are you seriously going to keep texting me?” she grouses, storming into Wells’ room. “Again, I’m  _ right here _ .”

“Are you seriously going to just keep lying here pining in silence?” Wells demands. 

“You’re making this sound so simple!” she cries. “I don’t want to ruin our friendship!”  
  
“It’s not going to ruin your friendship.”

“It might.”   


“It might not.”

“How are you so sure this is going to end well for me? He went out with Roma Johnson like two weeks ago so--”

“He made out with you like two hours ago.”

“ _ Wells _ .”

“ _ Clarke _ .” He grins, ruffling her hair, but then his face goes serious. “Look, I’m not telling you not to be nervous. I’m telling you to be brave. Just suck it up and do it, Clarke!”   


“Why are you so invested in this?!”   


“Because,” he shrugs, “it’ll make you happy. He’ll make you happy.” 

She can’t bite back her smile at that. “How’d you get so wise about all this stuff, huh?”   


Wells shrugs. “Natural talent?”   


“You’re such a weirdo.” Clarke worries her lip. “I wrote him a letter.”   


“Holy shit, like just now?”   


“Yup.”

Wells stares at her, wide-eyed. “If you were to disappear for like half-an-hour right now,” he says slowly, “say to Second Dawn. Or somewhere. I want you to now that as your brother, I would see it as my duty to cover for you should the parents get suspicious.” He makes a show of scratching behind his ear and yawning and acting like he’s  _ completely innocent _ . 

“ _ Such  _ a weirdo,” she grins, tackling him with a bear hug. “But thanks.”

 

The walk to Second Dawn is never very long, but like this, in the middle of the night when no one is around and she’s propelled by adrenaline and breathless anticipation, it seems less like a walk and more like a flight. She’s a little breathless as she arrives, retrieving the spare key from the third hanging basket by the window. As she walks in, she’s struck for a moment with the sharp familiarity of the place, the sheer sense of  _ Bellamy  _ that seems to permeate the air, to seep through the pages of every book and work itself into the cracks of every shelf. It’s as safe and whole as she’s ever felt, here in this place that’s as much a part of him as his body is. All in a moment, the nervousness dissipates. She pulls the letter from her pocket, kisses it quickly, too giddy to care about feeling ridiculous. 

There’s a part of her that wants to march up to his room and hand to him right now. But she’s still  _ Clarke _ , after all, so she doesn’t.

Instead, she picks her way through the shelves and bends in front of the poetry section. There it is --  _ The Letters and Poems of John Keats _ . It’s one of Bellamy’s favourites, and cheesy as it may be, she wants to pick something romantic. She tucks the letter between the pages.

Eventually, she decides to leave the book lying propped up on the cashier -- it’s the first thing he checks every morning. She grins, imagining him finding it, the little furrow that appears on his brow whenever sees a book out of place, the look of surprise when he realises there’s the corner of a letter sticking out of it, him reading the letter… 

The smile stays with her as she slips out of the shop, and it doesn’t slip off even as she falls asleep.

*

**_Present Day_ **

@RavenTheRiveter52: hey 

@RavenTheRiveter52: i know it’s you wells. and i know you won’t read this. but i’m going to write this anyway.

@RavenTheRiveter52: i have this letter i wrote but somehow i don’t think that would have felt right anyway. that’s not us you know??

@RavenTheRiveter52: and at least this way i still get to send it

@RavenTheRiveter52: i know it’s not really that different but it feels that way to me. i didn’t get to say anything to you when you were here to say something back. but i have to say something. so here it goes:

@RavenTheRiveter52: wells jaha. i know you. and you know me. better than anyone does. you’re my best friend and i’m in love with you. and it’s going to be a long time before i’m ready to put any of that in past tense.

@RavenTheRiveter52: none of this is fair btw. it feels like we never got the shot we deserved and i don’t know why. it’s like i just found you only to be told you’re gone. i like science because it makes things make sense. it’s not working for me right now. 

@RavenTheRiveter52: but whether or not you ever read this you deserve for me to tell you. i’m in love with you wells jaha and it feels like i always will be.

*

He doesn’t make a fanfare of telling Clarke that they have to start making preparations for closing down. And God, he’s glad it’s Clarke, because she doesn’t make a big deal when he tells her. She just nods and prints off a “CLEARANCE SALE: EVERYTHING MUST GO” sign to hang in the window. They work quietly most of the day, but it’s as slow as it always is. That’s why the sign has to go in the window after all. 

“Hey,” she says when they’ve closed. “You wanna go somewhere? Hang out for a while?”

They end up walking out a little way to the ice-cream store near the waterfront -- Bellamy is makes sure he walks to the left of her, the side closest to the sea -- and eating their cones on the bench outside, idly watching passersby. 

“You heard from Raven recently?” he asks. “I wonder how she’s doing.”

“She was pretty shaken up when I told her. I’ve seen her when I pass by the garage and stuff but that’s been it.”

“I wish I could do this all for you.”

Clarke frowns. “What do you mean?” 

His mouth quirks when he sees a glob of ice-cream smudged on her nose; Bellamy reaches out and swipes it off, licking it from his thumb and laughing when she blushes. 

“The… dealing with it. Having to tell people and think about Wells all the time. I know I can’t, but I wish I could do it for you.”   


She elbows him a little. “I get it. You always want to take care of everyone.”   


“Not like this though. This is just for you.” 

Clarke looks away from him, but he thinks he sees her smiling a little. 

In front of them a woman walks past holding hands with her son. The little boy is wearing swim trunks and Minecraft t-shirt, half-running and half-skipping as he chatters animatedly about something they can’t hear.

Clarke smiles at the kid when he catches her eye, and Bellamy watches her. 

“How’s Octavia doing?” Clarke asks him. “With selling up and stuff -- is she acting out?”

“No more than usual.” He shrugs. “I don’t think it really matters to her that much. She’ll get a bigger room when we move into a new apartment so. That’s something.” 

Clarke squeezes his hand. “I wish I could get the store back for you,” she echoes. 

Bellamy sighs. “People keep telling me it’s an  _ opportunity _ . There’s money, so the world is my oyster and whatever. Somehow it’s really hard to see it that way.”   


“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” she says, easy. “Just because there’s silver linings doesn’t mean the grey clouds stop existing.”

That makes him grin; it’s one of those moments that he can feel like a little pinch, a pinprick of a reminder that he really does adore her. “Damn, Princess, I feel like you’re coming for my title of the poet in this friendship.”

“Don’t worry, that was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever heard myself to say, so no danger of a repeat performance any time soon.”   


He laughs. “Ah, maybe it is a blessing in disguise. Maybe this is what snaps me out of my funk or whatever.”   


“Bellamy that store is your life. How is that a  _ funk _ ?”   


“It’s nothing,” he shakes his head, “just something Gina said.”

Clarke frowns. “Before you broke up?”

“No, I ran into her in the park a couple of days back.”

“Oh.” She goes quiet.

Bellamy takes the lull in conversation as an opportunity to steal a sidelong glance at her.  _ Ice Princess. _ That’s how he’d seen her at the start of the summer, cold and distant and aloof. It feels like a lifetime ago. She may not be the same person she was when they were kids, but, well, she’s still Clarke. His Princess. 

“I’m really glad you’re here,” he says. He thinks she can tell she doesn’t just mean “here” as in Arkadia. 

She smiles at him. “Me too. I missed it.”

He gets the feeling she doesn’t just mean Arkadia either.

*

When Clarke gets home, Callie’s practically standing at the door. “Your mom,” she mouths, pointing at the phone pressed to her ear. 

“Hey Mom,” Clarke says when Callie hands her the phone.

“Hi sweetie. It’s nice to hear your voice.”   


“You too.” 

A few beats pass before either of them speaks again.

“Thelonious is traveling for work again soon, it’s his first trip in a while.”   


“How’s he been holding up?”

“Oh, you know how it is.”   


“Yeah.”

Another beat.

“Clarke, sweetie, I’m actually calling to ask if you have any plans for when you come home.”   


“What?”   


“It’s almost the end of summer. I know you’ve needed the break -- God knows we all have. But if you have any ideas about what you want to do now, if you need my help…” 

For a second, she’s ready to offer an ambivalent “I’m looking at my options” and try to change the subject, but she stops. “I actually do have an idea. But I’m still hashing out the details. Can I get back to you when I have more logistics planned out.”   


“Sure. I’m just happy to know you have your mind set to something.”   


“Thanks, Mom.” 

“Clarke? You sound… you sound happier. I’m glad. I love you sweetie.”

“Love you too, Mom.”

She’s dialing Bellamy almost before she’s finished hanging up.

“What’s up Princess?” he says when he picks up, “everything okay?”   


“You should go to college.”

He’s quiet.

“We both should. We should apply this year.”   


“What are you talking about?”   


“I’ve spent the last few months hiding, Bellamy. From my real life and the people in it. And it’s time for me to stop doing that. And you, God, Bellamy you deserve it. I hate that you’re losing the store but that doesn’t have to mean losing everything else. I know you want to save everything for Octavia, but you have more money now. And more than that, you want it, I know you do. You deserve to do things for yourself sometimes.”

“Clarke…”

“I know this sounds out-of-the-blue. But… think about it, okay?”   


“Is this some sort of college application pact?” he laughs a little, sounding uncertain, but not dismissive, which Clarke takes as a good sign, “I jump, you jump?”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll think about,” he says after a moment.

“You will?”

“Why are you sounding so surprised? This was your idea.”   


“I know, I’m just excited.”   


Bellamy laughs and tells her goodnight, and she says it back, and then thinks about how maybe Abby was right. She does sound happier.

*

Raven is a little surprised to see Luna sat by the beach, which she realises seems counterintuitive given it’s Luna.

“Sorry,” she mutters when Luna sees her, “I didn’t realize you’d be here, I can go--”

“It’s a public beach,” Luna says, “you don’t have to run away. Sit.” She gestures at the space next to her on the rock. After a moment, Raven sits down.

“I owe you an apology,” she says. “I never meant to make you feel like I was using you.”

Luna smiles with a one-shouldered shrug. “I should apologise as well. I came down too hard on you. It’s just that…” she looks a little sheepish. “Well, I like you. And it stung to know that you didn’t feel the same way. But I should never have snapped at you for that.”

“Maybe we can both agree to put that behind us?” Raven offers. 

“I’d like that.”   


“And Luna. About the whole “liking me” thing…”

“You don’t have to explain, Luna says calmly, “it’s fine, I promise.”

“I am sorry. I think you’re one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. But I’m not going to be ready for anything like that for… a long time.”

Luna looks at her with that quiet, piercing gaze of hers, and all though Raven doesn’t say anything, she can’t help feeling like Luna hears her. 

“I get that. But…” she tilts her head to the side. “Could you use a friend?”

Raven looks at her and smiles, smiling even more widely when Luna smiles back.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’d really like that.”   
*

“You should come to this with me,” Bellamy says handing her one of the flyers.

“Apocalypse Rave?” Clarke reads the theme aloud with an eyebrow raised. “Sounds kind of dangerous.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s just a fancy way of saying they’re going to use Mountain Dew for all their mixers because it looks cool under strobe lights,” he admits, “but seriously. It wouldn’t be right to end the summer without hitting up The Dropship’s terrible theme night.”   


She shrugs. “Oh what the heck, sure, I’ll go.”

Bellamy high-fives her with a grin.

Honestly, he’s trying not to let the thoughts  _ end of summer  _ and  _ Clarke maybe leaving again  _ form unwanted associations in his mind, but it’s difficult. She seems to have become a permanent fixture in his life again, and this time he doesn’t know if he could deal with her leaving again and not feeling like his heart’s been ripped out of his body and taken away in a casket. But that’s the kind of weird scary-intense thought he figures it’s best to keep to himself. 

She’s at least oblivious to his thoughts, attacking a pile of boxes with the tape gun. 

“Nice form,” he tells her, “keep it up.” 

He grins at her little two finger salute.

The shop is beginning to feel emptier by the day, with more and more of the books being either shepherded into boxes or placed on sales tables. Bellamy gets through his days mainly by trying to make sure at least half his mind is occupied with other things at any given time, because any less than that and he becomes inescapably aware of what he’s being made to do.

A few people have come by to help out with the moving efforts -- Miller shows up to stack boxes every few days, Raven and Luna turn up for cleaning duty. Gina occasionally swings by bearing a cup of coffee for him, usually lingering for a conversation. It’s always a bit awkward, partially because Gina’s very recent breakup with Reuben seems to keep coming up, and mainly because Gina and Clarke don’t have much to say to each other. But it’s nice, in a bittersweet way, to see all their friends rallying around him at a time like this. 

There’s the added stress of having to gradually move everything into the new apartment Kane’s found. It’s not actually that far away, but it still feels momentous, something so alien after having stayed in one place for so long. Octavia seems pleased enough with her new room that she mellows out a little, which is a relief. 

“You should put an electric fence in her doorway,” Clarke had muttered to him.

“Watch it, that’s my little sister,” he’d hissed back, although failing somewhat to muffle his laughter. 

He really doesn’t want her to leave again. 

*

They’re on a lunch break, eating sandwiches behind the counter leaning against a few stacked up boxes. 

“Are you sure?” Bellamy demands. “You don’t think Evans deserves to be at least a  _ little  _ higher on your list of consideration?”   


“He’s not at the bottom or anything. But I’m definitely keeping Hemsworth at the top. I like Australians!”   


“You’re discounting the all-American goodness too quickly,” he sighs. “But I think we can all agree the  _ real  _ winner is Pine.”   


“He’s not better than Hemsworth!”   


“He’s  _ soulful _ .”   


Clarke throws a packing peanut at him which he swats away easily. 

“I wonder if we’ll ever get a new Chris in the game,” he muses. “One Chris to rule them all.”   
“Probably,” she concedes, “sometime in the future. When the world needs him the most.”   
“After the fire nation attacks?”   
She groans and he throws his hands up in mock surrender, proclaiming some bullshit about  _ you’ll be sorry for your cynicism when it turns out I’m right  _ and when she flips him off he lunges to tickle her sides where he knows it’ll get her the worst. He doesn’t let up until she’s begging him, and he peels himself away with a triumphant whoop. 

“When are you going to learn, Princess?” he loops an arm around her neck, boyish and affectionate, “you aren’t getting away from me that easy.”

And then, out of nowhere, and for no discernible reason, it hits her. 

She’s in love with him. 

Once, when Clarke was a little kid, she fell asleep on a plane ride. Usually, she'd always liked to stay awake as long as possible, taking advantage of the in-flight movies or gaping at the view from the window, but that particular time she'd been wiped out. She'd fallen asleep, lulled by the thrum of the engines and cool air of the cabin into a strange peaceful feeling of weightlessness. But when the plane began its descent, at the moment that the wheels hit the tarmac, she had jolted awake, suddenly abruptly aware of the way the plane had been flying, hurtling forward at impossible speeds, the realisation that what she'd taken for a tranquil state of suspension curled in her seat had actually taken her thousands of miles across the world. 

This right now, staring at him, this feels like that, that moment of wheels slamming onto the ground. She feels it like whiplash, like jolting awake and finding herself halfway across the planet -- the sharp moment of comprehension that what she had taken for the slow, tentative rebuilding of a friendship, a cautious attempt to learn and trust each other again had been... something else. Her falling in love with him again, or her realising she'd never really stopped being in love with him, or perhaps her picking up from where she'd left off the first time... something. 

The difference is that when a plane lands, it has windbreaks that rise from the wings, slowing it to a halt. Clarke has nothing, no shields left to throw up, no walls left to build-- her entire arsenal of self-defence mechanisms seems empty and useless faced with him. There's nothing to slow Clarke down, nothing to assuage the blinding rush that she realises is sending her tumbling towards him.

“Alright enough slacking,” he says, hoisting himself up off the floor, “back to work.”

It isn’t possible. This can’t really be happening; the same person, the same place.

“Clarke?” Bellamy raises an eyebrow when it takes her too long to reply, and then extends a hand to pull her up. She takes it, unthinking, and there’s a quick shock of static as their palms kiss, one that jolts her into meeting his eyes suddenly. Warm and steadfast and the safest things in the world, it’s hard to believe they haunted her once, a belligerent reminder of a broken heart.

This can’t be happening.  _ And yet _ , she’s forced to concede, as he pulls her up, steadying her with a hand on the waist and a smile in her direction,  _ it is _ . 

*

“This better not be a costume type of thing,” Miller grumbles, “if you tell me I’m supposed to wear a costume I swear to god I’ll strangle you.” 

“It’s not a costume thing. But even if it was, would it be so bad?”   


“Easy for you to say, you’d probably love to wear a goddamn cape all day if you could get one.”

Bellamy ignores him. “It’ll be fun.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Miller demands. 

“What do you mean?”   


“I mean,” he says, drumming his fingers lightly on one of the stacked up boxes, “why are you so hyped about this? You never care about Dropship nights this much. You don’t even like going out dude.”

He leans back on the stool, tipping it onto its two back legs and swinging like that for a moment before answering. “The whole end of summer thing. It’s just got me thinking about how it’s going to be weird when you guys all go off to college, that’s all.”   


“You could go too. Not now obviously, but you guys have some more money now. You could apply for next year, you have the grades for it. But,” Miller cuts him off before he can answer, “are you sure that’s all that’s bothering you?”

Bellamy looks at him.

“I get we’re all going and it’s rough, but are you sure there’s not anyone in particular you’re bummed about?”   


“Don’t worry Miller, you’ll always be number one in my heart.”

Miller sighs. “I’m never trying to help you with feelings shit ever again.” 

He wipes a hand over his face. “If you’re saying what I think you are then I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“You mean you don’t want to think about it or acknowledge that it exists. And by  _ it  _ I mean Clarke leaving.” 

“I got that, thanks.”   


“Dude.”   


“Fine. You’re right. I don’t want to think about it or talk about it or anything else. Because every time I do it kills me a little and I don’t want to waste the last few weeks we have together feeling like that.”

“Here’s the thing I don’t get,” Miller says. “Why are you acting like this is ‘the end’ or something? I know it sucks that she won’t be  _ here  _ but you’re acting like this means you’ll never see each other again or something.”

“Because that’s what happened last time! She left and I thought we could make it and it would be fine and then I never saw her again!”   


Miller watches him with an expression that Bellamy can’t quite place, apparently unsurprised by his outburst. “You did though.”   


“What?”   


“You did see her again. She came back.”

“That was a complete fluke,” Bellamy protests. “I can’t just pretend that that’s magically gonna happen again and be alright with it.”

“That’s not my point. I’m saying you went through your worst case scenario and came out of it alive. The only way this ends the same way as before is if you two act the same way as before. Which would be dumb.”   


“Noted.”   


Miller clears his throat. “Good talk. Never doing that again.”   


“Thanks man. I mean it.”

“Seriously. Never again.”

Bellamy turns Miller’s words over in his head even as the other boy starts talking about something else. On one level, he knows Miller’s right. If anything, this is a second chance, and one he knows he wants to take. He doesn’t think he can deal with it this time,  _ knowing  _ what he and Clarke have, how good it is, and watching it fade away into nothing. No, he can’t do that. 

But the thing is, he doesn’t know  _ what  _ to do over. He doesn’t know where they went wrong the first time. There was the distance, the lack of communication and the long silences. But all of that came after. After something that made Clarke pull away, something he did. 

He just has no idea what.

“Hello! Are you listening?”

He blinks.

Miller rolls his eyes. “Dude. Stop that.”   


“Stop what?”

“Trying to figure every last detail out in your own head. This doesn’t just involve you, remember?”   


“I know!” Bellamy protests. “But I don’t even know where I fucked up last time. What if she doesn’t want to change anything, huh? What if she wants to disappear again?”  _ What if she wants to leave me behind?  _

Miller looks unimpressed. “You know who’d have all these answers a hell of a lot better than I would?”

“Yeah, but--”

“Dude. Just talk to her.”

*   
It’s bad enough that she comes to the beach. When they were kids, Clarke used to insist that the best way to deal with the pain of a stubbed toe or a skinned knee was to pinch yourself really  _ really  _ hard. The new pain would distract you from the old one, she’d insist, it really did work.

Bellamy would just duck away and tell her to “stop trying to freaking pinch me and get me a band-aid, god!”

But Clarke’s nothing if not stubborn, and the principle applies. The sound of the ocean and the glint of sunlight across the waves still makes her throat close and her stomach roil, but sat in the safety of her car, it’s enough of a distraction from. Well, from everything else. She has to be at the Dropship in an hour, but she’s having a hard time mustering up the courage to so much as turn the engine on, let alone go anywhere.

On some level, she knows it’s ridiculous. Just because she knows she’s dealing with a seismic revelation doesn’t mean anyone else does. She managed to go months without anyone finding about Wells, she can go one evening without Bellamy discovering her feelings for him. It’ll be easy. Every survival instinct, every ounce of carefully measured rationality she has tells her to keep this to herself and move on, to avoid going through the sting of rejection and a long drawn out heartbreak again.    
But she’s not sure she wants to. 

Something, some small voice inside resists the idea of keeping it to herself.  _ That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt _ . The line comes back to her out of nowhere. It’s something from John Green, she thinks, one of the books Bellamy gave her for her birthday knowing it would make her cry. It’s not entirely relevant to her situation, but then again, maybe it is. If she’s learnt anything, it’s that love and pain aren’t really so different. 

The fact is, she doesn’t want to hide this, doesn’t think she  _ can _ . She can feel it like a physical thing that’s straining to get out. It’s fucking terrifying. 

Her phone lights up, a short text from Callie instructing her to  _ have fun!!  _ and  _ get home safe x _ . It’s enough to shake her from her reverie.

Clarke can’t hide out here forever, she knows that. She takes another long look at the sea -- it’s calm today, as smooth and green as glass. Glass can shatter and oceans can turn stormy but you wouldn’t know it from looking across the water today. 

She turns the ignition on and drives, pressing a little harder on the accelerator with each quicker jump of her heartbeat. 

She swings by the house quickly, and Clarke takes longer than she normally would getting ready. It’s still nothing fancy, but it’s more effort than she’s put in to dressing up over the last few months -- a clingy off-the-shoulder top and some careful licks of mascara and eyeliner. She feels a little silly, but also a little more brave. Her eyes flick to the picture of Wells, and for once, it’s not followed by a sharp stab of pain.

“Oh, shut up,” she tells the photo, lips quirking. “Don’t be so smug.”   


There’s no reply, obviously. But it feels like there is. Somewhere.

By the time she pulls up outside the Dropship, the party already seems to be in full swing. The line of people waiting to get in buzzes with energy, and the air pulses with music and anticipation. 

She sees Bellamy before he sees her, and yeah, there it is, that feeling of looking of him and something in her heart going  _ oh, there you are _ , and she finds herself walking over to him, almost not scared at all now. 

“I’ve been looking for you,” he says when he sees her, smiling.

She smiles back. “Yeah. Me too.”

Neither of their smiles seem to fade as they join the queue, and hers only grows when he takes her hand, tugging her behind him.

Bellamy fixes her with a wry smile. “Dance?” he aks over the music.

Clarke nods. He takes her hands and loops them round his neck before placing his own on her waist. It’s a bit like middle school, and they’re swaying a little too slow for the music, a little off-kilter. But they’re in time with each other, and that’s all they need to make it work. 

“Having fun yet, Princess?”   


“You know me, I’m always having fun.”   


He huffs a laugh. “You haven’t changed  _ that  _ much.”

“Hey, I resent that.”   


Bellamy chuckles, boyish and lovely. “I’m glad you’re here.”   


“I’m glad I’m here with you.”   


His expression softens at that, and she ducks her head so he can’t see her smiling.

“Hey,” he taps her under her chin and she looks up in surprise. “Don’t hide. I like looking at you.” His cheeks colour. “Sorry…”

“It’s okay.” She squeezes at the base of his next slightly, wondering if he can feel her fingers tremble. 

The song changes then, a swooping romantic ballad that’s been all over the charts lately. Some people start booing.

“They don’t seem to like it,” Clarke notes.

“They don’t have anyone to dance with.” Bellamy pulls her closer suddenly, flush against his chest, his chin resting on her head. Heat skitters up her spine.

It definitely doesn’t feel like middle school any more.  

“Is this okay?” 

She can feel his voice, it thrums from his chest into hers.

“It’s good.”   


They’re quiet as they sway, but not the awkward kind, not the kind that means they’ve run out of things to say. Not that kind at all. She doesn’t really pay attention to the song, or to anything really, except for the warmth of him, the security of his arms around her.

_ This is it _ , she realises. She knows with curious certainty that she’ll never feel the way she does now with anyone or anything else. It feels like home. 

This time, the realisation doesn’t strike her like lightning or anything. It rises like the sun, filling her with warmth and light and certainty that everything about this is right.

When the song ends, she reaches up to murmur in his ear. “You wanna go outside for a minute?”

Bellamy looks at her, and she can see her own pulse of anticipation reflected in his eyes. He nods. “I’ll get us some drinks. See you in a minute?” He gives her hand a squeeze, a promise.

“See you in a minute.”   


The chill of the night air feels even colder against her skin, which is hot and sweaty from being inside, but she doesn’t think her shivers have anything to do with temperature. She bounces a little on the balls of her feet, restless.

_ This is it _ . 

It’s a strange thing, this feeling of knowing with utmost certainty that she’s about to change her life, and stranger still to not be entirely afraid of it. She crosses her arms across her chest, hands curled into her sides so that they won’t tremble. Inside, she hears the song change again. Bellamy’s still not out. 

She gives it another minute before her impatience bubbles over, and she shoulders the door open, pushing her way back inside.

It’s difficult to spot him immediately for a few reasons. 

For one thing, the throng of people is dense and confusing, and it’s hard to spot one person among them.

For another, when she does find him, he’s not facing her. He’s facing Gina. 

As a matter of fact, he’s not so much facing her as he is kissing her. 

Her hands grasp his shoulders and he’s bent down to her height and once again Clarke can feel her heart splinter in her chest. 

Bellamy pulls back, and then his eyes land on her, widening. He starts to move towards her. Clarke knows she can’t do it. She raises her hand in a wave, offers him a watery smile, and mouths,  _ “I’m gonna head _ .” 

She doesn’t look back to see if he follows her out the door. She doesn’t look back at all.

*

The line for the bar is a long one, but it gives Bellamy an extra moment to try regulate his heartbeat so he doesn’t mind too much. The Dropship is heady and stifling, but he feels like he’s just been woken up with a splash of cold water -- like he’s seeing the world in technicolour for the first time. 

The queue shuffles forward, a jarring reminder that around him the world is continuing like nothing’s changed, and he approaches the counter.

“You’re here!” a voice says next to him. 

“Hey Gina,” he says, distractedly.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she tells him. There’s a slur to her voice. 

“Yeah,” he turns to the bartender, “two Cokes please.” 

Gina’s still there when he turns back with the cans. 

“I was missing you,” she says. 

It’s unlike her, the drunken drawl and the unfocused gaze. He frowns. “Are you good? Let’s get you sat down somewhere, yeah?”   


“Reuben’s a dick,” she declares, “he’s a dick and I don’t want to care about him anymore. I don’t  _ want to _ .”

“Okay,” he says, “just come on over here.” He elbows his way through the crowd towards the sofas at the side of the room. If he can just make her drink a glass of water and find Naomi or Hunter or one of her other friends to keep an eye on her, he can go find Clarke.  

“You’re not a dick,” she tells him. “I’m glad you’re not a dick.”

“Here,” he says, reaching the seating in relief, “just sit down and I’ll get you some water.”   


“You’re so nice,” she says, stumbling forward and catching herself on his shoulders. “You’re always so  _ nice  _ to me.”

“Just wait here,” he says.

Gina lurches forward and tugs his head down, pressing her mouth to his. He freezes in surprise for a full second, before pulling back.

“Woah,” he tells her, “don’t do that.”   


Her face crumples. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I just miss Reuben.” She slumps into the sofas. 

Bellamy turns around quickly, searching the crowd for any of her friends. And then his stomach drops because there’s Clarke, a stricken expression on her face. 

“Fuck,” he says, “ _ fuck _ . Clarke!” he knows his voice isn’t carrying over the music, but it doesn’t matter. He has to get to her. 

She waves at him, giving him that smile-that’s-not-a-smile she does, and turns away. 

“Damn it!” Bellamy can’t get through any faster short of physically pushing people out of the way, which he’s ready to do. He spots Naomi from his senior AP Gov class, and grabs her quickly, saying “Gina’s by the sofas, go take care of her,” and moving past quickly. By the time he stumbles out of the club, Clarke is nowhere in sight.

He manages to drive to Callie’s house faster than is probably safe, runs so fast to pound on the door that when Callie opens it he’s breathless.

“Is Clarke here?” he asks. “I need to speak to her.”   


Callie looks alarmed. “No, she was supposed to be out? Is she alright?”   


“She’s safe,” he says, “but I screwed up. And I really,  _ really  _ need to talk to her.” 

Something in his expression stops her from asking any questions. “I’ll tell her to call you if she comes back.”   
He doubts that will work, but he thanks her anyway and runs off. 

Bellamy drives down the high street, round a few of the restaurants and cafés that are still open, past the parks. He texts Raven, and Miller, and Clarke. He texts Clarke too many times, but she doesn’t respond. Bellamy wonders if he’s going out of his mind, speeding through Arcadia like a lunatic at midnight, if this is what insanity looks like. He remembers reading something in  _ Deathless  _ last Christmas --  “You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.” It hadn’t meant much more to him than a pretty sounding phrase then, but fuck if he doesn’t understand it now. 

He ends up, out of a potent mixture of desperation and exhaustion, back at the bookstore. She’s not there, though he hadn’t really expected her to be. That doesn’t stop him from thundering round like a madman though. He pounds up the stairs and bursts into Octavia’s room without knocking.

“Where’s Clarke?” he demands before she has time to yell at him, “have you seen her?”   


“No!” Octavia looks too startled by his appearance to react properly.

He turns to go, and almost trips over a loose pile of clothes strewn on the floor. 

“For fuck’s  _ sake _ !” he snaps, “would it kill you to tidy up?” He grabs the clothes in his fists, shoving them forcefully into the empty hamper. And then he grabs the pillows, the open make up bags and torn magazines and snack wrappers, starts clearing everything off the floor with alarming force.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she cries.

He ignores her, slamming the assortment of shoes and slippers he’s picked up back under her bed. There’s more crap shoved under there, and he snatches it out like some kind of madman digging for gold. A sheaf of uncompleted homework assignments, a book, an old coin purse. He slams it all onto her desk.

“It would make everyone’s life easier if you’d just do  _ something _ to help out,” he says, “clean, or do work, or anything. Everyone’s including your own. Why can’t you see that?”

“I don’t know what your problem is,” she yells, “but you need to go!”   


“Look at this!” He waves the book at her, “why is this even here? You haven’t voluntarily read a book in years!” Bellamy glances at the cover -- it’s a volume of Keats he’d thought was lost. “I’ve been looking for this everywhere, and it’s just up here, buried in all your crap gathering dust because you couldn’t be fucked to consider how anyone else feels for  _ one  _ moment!”   


Octavia’s stopped speaking but he doesn’t notice.

“Just sort your shit out,” he says, “I’m taking  _ this _ back.” He waves the book at her to make a point, but something falls out. 

Octavia lunges for it suddenly, but he gets there quicker, grabbing it before it hits the floor. 

He stares at it. It’s a piece of paper, folded up neatly and thin with age. Written in neat cursive handwriting that he recognizes as well as his own is his name. 

“What is this?” he asks.    


“Bell--”

“What is this?” 

The manic fervour leaves him at once as he stares at his name written in Clarke’s handwriting. He walks out of Octavia’s room, for once utterly oblivious to anything she yells after him, doesn’t stop until he’s back in his own room. He sits on his bed before opening it, and glancing at the date. 

It’s dated for four years ago.

“Why do you have this?”

Octavia looks away. “I took it when she left it for you.”

He stares at the letter. “Why?”

His sister’s voice trembles. “She was getting out of here. I thought if you read it, you might get out too. I didn’t want you to leave me behind.”

His sister, his little sister who he’s loved and cared for his whole life. He doesn’t have it in him to hate her for this. But he doesn’t have it in him to stay and comfort her either, not right now. He unfolds the paper, his eyes taking a moment to focus properly on the words.

 

_ Hey Bellamy, _

_ I know this is a bit weird, but I really want to talk about what happened tonight. The thing is, I like you. Really like you, as in, not just because you’re my best friend. I  _ _ like _ _ you. And not just because of last night. That made me realise I can’t ignore my feelings anymore, but my feelings were already there. If I’m being honest, I think I might be in love with you. I have no idea what that’s supposed to feel like, but I think this is it. I mean, I love every single thing about you. I love your freckles and the way they look like stars on your face. I love the way you act like you’re hot shit until someone says one incorrect fact about Ancient Rome and you’re  _ gone _.  _ _ I love the way you look without a shirt, especially after practice when you’re all sweaty. _ _ I love when you go too long without cutting your hair and then complain about it tickling the back of your neck. I love how much you love the bookstore, the way you see things, whole worlds in those old books and the people that have read them; I love the way you help me to glimpse them too. I love how much you care about things even--especially--when you pretend you don’t. I love the feeling of you hugging me, the feeling of being safe and whole. I love you even when I get the feeling you’re too dense to love yourself. And I know we haven’t spoken about last night, I know to you it probably wasn’t even a big fucking deal and I probably sound insane right now--but I loved last night too. Anyway my point is, I’m into you. Romantically. I’m just making sure you get that down because you can be really emotionally obtuse for someone so fucking smart. And hey, we all get that love letters don’t really seem to be my style, but I know you’d be all over it so--here you go. Pretend I’m the Wentworth to your Anne Eliot or whatever it is you and your beautiful dorky mind desire. Anyway. I’d really like if we could talk face-to-face before I leave tomorrow. Text me once you’ve read this, you know I’m going to be freaking out. _

_ See you in the morning? _

_ All my love _

_ Love, _

_ Clarke x _

 

By the time he puts it down, his head is spinning. 

She loves him.

Loved him.

She loved him and she told him and he never knew.

Everything he’s remembered about the last four years melds and reshapes, his lens for the world refocusing. 

He takes his phone out and dials Clarke.

Miraculously, she picks up. 

“Where are you?” he says instantly.

“I’m fine. Just got tired so I went home.”   


“You’re not at home. I looked for you.”   


Silence.

“Please, I really need to speak to you.”

She’s quiet a beat longer. “I’m at the overlook.”

“Okay,” he says, “okay, I’m coming. I’ll be there in ten. Please just… stay.”   


He makes the drive in half that time.

Clarke’s standing when he arrives, looking composed. 

“Hey,” she says quickly, “sorry I ditched. I just--”

“I didn’t kiss Gina,” he cuts her off. “She ran into me and she was drunk and she kissed me. I stopped it straight away.

He thinks he sees her composure falter, but she offers a brittle laugh and continues. “It’s fine, Bellamy. It doesn’t affect me.”

“No?”

“I don’t care who you kiss.”   


He pulls the letter from his pocket. “I found this, okay?”   


Her eyes go wide. “What do you mean you  _ found  _ it?”   


“I mean I didn’t know this existed. I didn’t know you wrote this until twenty minutes ago. I didn’t know you felt this way.”   


Clarke worries her lip. “Well, whatever. It’s an old letter. It doesn’t matter now.” 

“It matters to me.” 

“Fuck, Bellamy do you know how much it hurt the first time? Putting that all out there and then thinking you were just ignoring it like it was nothing?” She swallows. 

“You don’t even  _ remember _ , do you? That we kissed?”   


“No. I was drunk and I don’t remember it. I never read this letter, I never said anything to you. But, God, Clarke, you have to know how much I wish I had. I am so so sorry I hurt you, and I am so so sorry it took this long. But I don’t want to run away and pretend this doesn’t exist.”

She looks away. “I get that. And I’m not  _ blaming  _ you. But Bell, you’re not the one who gets hurt here, alright? And I just… I don’t want to do that again.”   


“You think I don’t get hurt?” he asks, voice raw. “Clarke, I felt like I’d been ripped in half when you left. I’ve spent weeks going out of my mind because I’m so afraid of losing you when you leave again.”

“You’re not going to lose me,” she says, “you don’t have to feel obligated to come pity me because of some letter, alright?”

He feels like she’s punched him. “ _ Obligated _ ?”

“Bellamy you’re always trying to take care of people and look out for them, but that doesn't apply here. You don’t have to come make me feel better about this because you feel guilty for what happened--”

“Would you stop?!” 

She blinks, thrown off by his outburst.

“Stop trying to talk your way out of this. You don’t alway have to rationalise your way through everything, Clarke. Can you hear me out before saying anything?”   
Biting her lip, she gives a single nod.

“I was a dumb kid. I didn’t read this, I didn’t remember our first kiss, and I never tried to find out what was wrong. I just got mad and let you slip away. But that was a long time ago. I’m not letting you go that easy. Fuck, I’m never letting you go again, unless you want me to. And I’m definitely not letting you go anywhere without telling you that I love you. I’m in love with you, Clarke Griffin. So if you’re telling me the truth, and this,” he waves the letter at her, “doesn’t mean anything any more, I’ll let it go. I’ll stay your friend because even having you in my life as my best friend makes me happier than I feel like I’ve got any right to be. But if… if it’s still true. Then I’m yours. I’m yours, however you want me.” He swallows. “So.” He hands her the letter, smudged and translucent from how tightly he’s been grasping it. “Do you still mean this?”   


Clarke looks at the letter, and then back at him.   


“No.” 

His heart drops. “Okay. Thank you for--”

“Bellamy.” She takes his hand, and he glances up at her from beneath his lashes. 

“Yes?”

“ _ This _ is something I wrote when I was a child. When we were kids and you were all I’d ever known. How could it be true for me now? After I’ve gone through losing you, and losing Wells, cutting you out of my life and only to have you help me rebuild it?” She draws a little closer to him, and something like hope reawakens in his chest. 

“I don’t think I knew what falling in love meant when I wrote this, Bellamy. I didn’t know what this,” she brings his hand up and presses his fingers to her mouth quickly, “felt like.”

He lets his arms snake around her waist. “Oh, yeah?”   


“Yeah. Bell, when I wrote this, it was because you were my first love. Now,” she reaches up, leaves a slow, lingering kiss on his cheek. “It’s because you’re my last.”   


“You know, Princess,” he says, his heart thudding as he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I may not remember our first kiss. But I definitely remember the second one.”   


“Is that right?”   


“I think about it a lot,” he cups her face in his hands and draws her closer. “All the time, in fact.” He drops a kiss on each of her eyelids as they flutter shut. “It’s getting to be a problem.”

“Well,” she murmurs, “that sounds terrible.”   


“The worst,” he agrees, and then his mouth slants over hers, and they don’t talk anymore.

*

Bellamy has his mouth on her the second he gets the door open. She can’t seem to stop  _ touching  _ him, skating her hands up his arms to wind in his curls, pressing herself right up against his chest, pressing her mouth against his neck. Not that Bellamy seems to mind. He rains kisses on every inch of her skin that he can reach, lingering at her collarbone and her jaw and the hollow of her throat before she whines and he claims her mouth again. She’s overwhelmed with him, the taste and feel and scent of him filling her senses. He curls his hands just under her knees and she gasps when he hitches her up, wrapping her legs around his waist. 

“I like it when you hold me,” she tells him.

He plants a kiss on her chin. “I like holding you.”

Clarke ducks her head to kiss him again. She rakes her nails down his back, making him groan. They slam against one of the shelves, and Bellamy’s arms tighter around her, his hands digging so hard into her sides she thinks they bruise. Her hips buck into his a little, and then he’s pushing at her shirt, shoving it up her sides. She’s desperate to get it off, to feel his hands on her burning skin. She stretches her arms up to make it easier for him, back bowing pleasure, head tipping back—

Something heavy bounces off her head and knocks Bellamy’s face as it drops. They blink at each other in surprise. It’s a book — Clarke must have knocked it off the shelf. She looks at Bellamy, takes in his swollen lips and blown eyes. He swipes at her cheek with his thumb.

“Uh. Are you okay?”

“I think I might have a bump in the morning.” 

Suddenly, they’re both laughing, doubled over with the effort of keeping their chortles muffled and silent. Bellamy nips at her nose once, making her giggle, then lowers her carefully to the ground. He presses his lips to the place where her head was hit, stoops to pick up the book and replace it on the shelf, and laces their fingers together.

She follows as he trails upstairs -- it takes them longer than it needs to, because he keeps stopping to press her against the wall and kiss her senseless -- and into his bedroom. 

They kiss on his bed, exploring every inch of each other with their hands and mouths. They’re too tired to go much further, but they kiss and kiss and kiss until they fall asleep, tangled together like they’re daring the world to try part them again.

*

**_Three Weeks Later_ **

“We can turn round whenever you want.”

“I know. But I want to do this.”   


Bellamy nods and parks the car, coming round the back to help her unload the trunk. It’s overcast and a little windy, but that just means they have the beach to themselves. 

Clarke arranges their towels and blankets on the sand, stripping down to her two-piece before she can change her mind. 

“Can you go in and wait for me?” she asks Bellamy. “Just so I know you’ll catch me.”

He nods, kissing her quickly before turning to head towards the water. It makes her smile -- she doesn’t know if she’s supposed to be used to the fact that they can and will kiss whenever they want now, but it still makes her heart flip in her chest. 

She edges up towards the shoreline slowly. This whole day out was her idea -- the four-month backpacking trip around Europe that she and Bellamy have planned is bound to be peppered with beaches, she had reasoned, and it would only make sense to try reacquaint herself with the sea before going. 

Besides. Wells would be proud of her for going. He wouldn’t want her to be afraid, least of all because of him.

She stares at the sea foam that rushes towards her with the ebb-and-flow of the tide. It runs cool between her toes, and the sensation is almost enough to make her turn and run.

Clarke glances up. Bellamy’s stood there, waist-deep. He waves at her. She steps in. 

It’s cold, the water, and a part of her is still thrown into panic as she feels the undeniable strength of the current. But she closes her eyes, takes a breath, and wades in deeper.

When she reaches Bellamy, he reaches out and catches her. She keeps her focus on him as he gathers her against his stolid chest, steady against the waves.

“How you doing?”

She nods, rests her forehead against the dip of his jaw. “This is okay.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.” She kisses him, lets the warmth of his mouth cut through the cold of the water.

It’s too cold to really stay in for very long, and she gets the sense Bellamy is rushing things along a little for her sake, but they get out soon, drying off with towels. Bellamy sits Clarke between his legs and wraps a blanket around them. She leans back against his chest with her eyes closed. 

“It still wasn’t great,” she tells him, “I don’t think I’d choose to do it again. But I know I can now.”

“I’m proud of you,” he tells her.

“I’m proud of you too.” Clarke rests her hands over his. “For agreeing to go with me. Leaving Arkadia, traveling…. I know it’s a lot for you.”   


“Seeing the world with you isn’t exactly a hardship, Princess,” he says lightly, but she won’t let him laugh this one off.

“Seriously. I’m really happy that you’re living your life for yourself for a change.” She cranes her head back to kiss him, and sighs. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get sick of that.”   


Bellamy grins. “Good.” 

They lounge there for a while, talking about their friends -- Raven’s just gone off to college, still grieving, but doing alright. Luna’s going to drive up and visit her at some point. Miller’s been cast in his college drama department’s production of  _ A Midsummer Night’s Dream _ , and has reluctantly agreed to send a recording. 

“You think that could be us in a year?” she asks.

“What, starring in Shakespeare?”

She shrugs. “Doing college stuff.”

He cards his hand through her hair, working her scalp with her fingers. “We could.”

Clarke turns so she’s facing him. “You’re going to apply?”

Bellamy flushes. “Well since you’re going to go, I figured I might as well.” 

She smiles, laughing when he buries face in her neck. “That’s awesome.”

He ducks his head. “I’m pretty excited,” he admits.

They stay crowded together on the beach until the shadows grow long. Idly, Clarke lets her mind wander to the months ahead. Her mom and Thelonious are going to come and visit, maybe hold a memorial service here. She’ll tell them to have it over a long weekend, so Raven can come back for it. There’s some organizing and stuff that needs to be done with the last of the packing up of Second Dawn. It’s a bittersweet process but it has to be done. And then they leave -- Paris, London, Vienna, and Dublin are first on their list. She like the idea. They’ve spent this long getting to know each other, now they can go get to know the world. Together. It’s a frivolous romantic notion, but it’s nice to be able to indulge in those once in a while. 

“I love you,” she says.

He kisses her shoulder. “I love you too. And I love hearing you say it. I want you to say it all the time. I want to say it all the time.”   


“I won’t be stopping you.”

After their trip, who knows? They’ll apply to college. They may end up in the same school, or in different sides of the country. Their future could involve frequent weekend drives to see each other, or else static-filled Skype calls and late night text conversations. Any of it could happen really. 

It doesn’t matter though, she realises, feeling more at home in the circle of his arms than she ever has anywhere else. 

They’ll make it.   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that lived up to expectations! Please do leave a comment letting me know what you thought, it really makes a writer's world go round lmao. Thank you all so much for reading <3 <3

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 2 is complete and Chapter 3 is almost there so updates should be quick.
> 
> Like I said, I've never been this nervous to share a fic in my life lmao so any comments/kudos would be huuuuuugely appreciated <333


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